August 10

Generally, I've had a decent day. Had some ups (nice run, yummy breakfast burrito + aglio e olio for dinner, discovering some truths about pancreatic cancer, listening to Cory Wong's latest album, Agnes attempting unsuccessfully to jump onto my journal on the desk), some downs (Bob refusing to share his notes with me for some odd reason), some in-betweens, but overall not so bad.

Cory Wong is a beast. 4 albums this year? It's not even September. Goes to show what one can achieve when one puts one's mind to things.

I'm legitimately excited to do microfluidics modeling in COMSOL again. I feel in my element.

James Altucher's spammy email of the day was entitled "All I want to do is play." It made me think: what is my ideal mix of play and work? What's the difference between the two anyway? I wonder how Cal Newport would square his "Don't follow your passion" advice with the quote from James Michener: “The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both. ”

At least by their traditional definitions, my "work" is research, my "play" is either teaching or bass. But sometimes bass feels like work and sometimes (at the best times) research feels like play. Yet, I feel I do my best work in research when I'm a little stressed out, in a healthy way. So in a way, it's work that I feel a low barrier to get started doing; it doesn't quite feel like play. 

Inevitably, I'm going to need a mix of both.

I retire tonight motivated to put a little Cory Wong energy in my daily routine.