Christmas Day was surprisingly good for me this year. Though it was pouring rain, I ventured out to the house of a friend who said that she might be receiving guests for Christmas. When I arrived, I found a number of familiar people, loads of delicious food, and the hostess welcoming me saying that not only was I invited, but that she had been hoping I would attend. Later that evening I went to another friendly couple's home where I was again fed well and warmly. Much better than what I feared, indeed, and I did not feel like a social loser.

I did physics on Christmas Day. Not very much, but just enough to establish a token presence and give evidence of my devotion to the One Born on Christmas Day, that is, Sir Isaac Newton. I have put aside the difficult gravity business for a later return, and gone on to the next chapter, which is about "Work and Mechanical Energy." I'm back to vectors and those sliding blocks again, though this time it's about how much work is done to make them slide their distance. It's force multiplied by distance, including forces which are mitigated by their being at an angle from the object's line of motion. That's when I get to trot out my trig again, when I have to vectorize to get the resultant force. This is familiar territory. I go through about a page of the book per day, more if it is not a work day.

The nature of work for this kind of high school physics is defined as moving something over a distance. But of course that isn't the only kind of work. There's my work at the day job, in which I am not moving things over distances (except when putting signs up) but producing things (advertisements). Then there's social work, which I don't do, and body work, about which I have only a vague notion involving massage. There's artistic work, which, at least in modern times, is more about the process of making the art than the actual art object itself. Though for me, being a commercialoid artist, it actually is about the art work made for a commission or for a show or market.

It may sound paradoxical, but I like work. Without it to give structure to my life, I would get depressed, especially at this time of year when there is so little light and warmth. It helps greatly to have a job I like; I know too many people who don't. I worked for many years when I didn't have an "outside" job, doing freelance illustration and art. But right now I like the structure (and, needless to say, the regular paycheck) of a steady job. As the physics book puts it, it is "work of a constant force." And studying physics is work, too, except that the only things that I move, through imagined space, are numbers, symbols, and ideas.

Posted at 2:55 am | link