Hardly any math is getting done here. I haven't had the time. I have been holding down the day job as well as getting a number of private art jobs done, such as a portrait, a T-shirt logo, and preparing for a small show this weekend. I don't know what I spend the rest of my time doing. I seem to spend a lot of time cleaning things, and pushing papers around my living quarters. The papers come in the mail, stacks and stacks of glitzy holiday catalogs and advertisements for bright colored things. The more papers I throw out or recycle, the more I have. I'm not sure how that works. Is this extra paper mass coming in from another dimension?

I also spend plenty of time in Starbucks Coffee shops. Some of this is because I do decorative signs for them. They pay me in coffee and food items. This is a time-honored artist thing. I have drunk many a "free" double tall cappuccino while putting art nouveau designs on the "Daily Offerings" board of Starbucks. You can see a couple of my Starbucks images here and here. They are done in water-based paint markers on smooth-textured chalkboards. When it's time to change the theme and coffee blend, I just wash it all off with detergent and water. I photograph all the designs, so that when the original is gone, I still have the image.

If Starbucks Coffee did not exist, someone would have to invent it, so that people could sit and read newspapers, sketch in their sketchbooks, study their college textbooks and write weblogs on their laptop computers. I have not gotten to the point of writing this Weblog on a laptop at Starbucks, but I know it will happen sooner or later. Sometimes I can be disgustingly trendy. But you will never catch me wearing a bare-belly crop top or a ring through my eyebrow.

Now the dreadful "Holiday Season" has arrived, with its commercial and cultural flogging. I stare dimly at the heaps of brightly lit sweets and gift items, and the only thing I really want to do is retire to a woodsy den somewhere and hibernate like a bear. Wake me in April. It is very noisy here. Every store and public place has a soundtrack playing, and this year they seem to have all picked "soul hits" as their default. (It may be a regional thing. You folks in California or Boston might not have to listen to it.) This is a kind of pop music involving a lot of howling, screeching, and belting. "Traditional" Christmas tunes are subjected to a "soul" arrangement, resulting in abominations such as Aretha Franklin wailing her way through "O Tannenbaum." The Queen of Soul has had far better moments than this. I have also heard a hip-hop version of "White Christmas." I know it is coming, somewhere in between the aisles at Giant Foods or Staples. No! Not again!!

This weekend, after the turkey feast, I am off to a small fantasy convention, where I will show a few pieces of art. This convention, which has been held in the same place and same time each year for the last twenty-one years, is mostly a social get-together. At least two of my Friendly Mathematicians will be there. But there will probably be a pop-music Christmas soundtrack at the hotel.

What I have managed to read in Sawyer's calculus introduction book is a discussion of "negative velocity," in which the direction of movement might be "backwards," but still measurable, although in negative numbers. At this moment I feel as though my math and physics study is going at negative velocity.

Posted at 4:22 am | link