The glory days

My summer is half over now. Half. I find this hard to believe. But I've had some interesting (to me) realizations so far. The biggest, by far, is that I'm loving being so very far away. I have literally nothing to do but work and I'm loving it. No guilt whatsoever!

I get up in the morning, pedal my dippy little bike in (I'm still offended it's a girly-bike, but that's just me), and settle down. Twelve or fourteen hours later I go back to my little room and maybe run. The best thing I've found about the length of the days here is that I can stay later at work. A decent chunk of time is just reading blogs or playing scrabble, which I tend to view as not getting in my brain's way while it works. The rest of the time is slogging. But I'm not minding the slogging. And then, when I get home, I pick up the text I'm working through and read it for awhile. It's ridiculous; it ought to be horrible. And it's fabulous.

See, here's the thing: there is nobody and nothing here to make any sort of demands on me that aren't about research (okay, and grant proposals, but I'm not thinking about those right now). I don't have anything to tend to but my research, and I can nurture the ideas I'm having. I thought I'd be lonely, and I thought that I wouldn't like the more national-labby feel of the Institute, because I love the university environment. I was wrong. I like almost everything about being here. People are serious about just doing science, and while I find a lot of the science they're doing to be dull, it's still all about the science.

I can hide from everything else in the world (what, my president groped a foreign head of state? you don't say?) and just work. Normally, in my real world, I can't do that. I have to worry about the house, or think about healing old wounds, and work on courses, and nurture graduate students, but here I'm not in that world, and instead of feeling guilty about taking time away from those things, those obligations, to do science, I can glory in it. Glory in the hedonistic indolence of being perfectly selfish and just do science.