Reeling and resting and traveling

I’m still reeling a bit these days. I thought the trip to Louisiana would get me sorted out, but I’ve come back and a week and a half later still find myself at loose ends. I only just broke out Anki (my flashcard app for learning German) on the train today, and I haven’t done all that much reading. I went to a birthday party for a college friend last weekend, and had brunch with my sister, but that’s about all that I’ve done since getting home.

It’s good to let ourselves rest. In a world as cacophonous as ours, it feels like such a relief to embrace silence. I have to tell myself that, anyway. There are German sentences to study and there is dog food to buy and there is laundry to put away, but right here, and right now, I’m just going to rest. I’ve been keeping up with my family, I guess. I’ve been texting and phoning them, so there’s at least that that I’ve been doing.

My partner and I were trying to build this script that takes tweets from a variety of people in mergers and acquisitions and mines them for updates on when to buy and sell stocks. We made a decent bit of progress, but when it came to actually understanding the tweet (as opposed to just finding a publicly traded company name) we really hit a wall. I guess it makes sense — natural language processing is hard for real AI, not just stuff that two people whip up in their free time.

I found myself at the mercy of an army of bots right here on this blog. I’ve had to disable commenting except for logged-in individuals, because I was getting so many spam comments I couldn’t keep up with all of them! It was a little flattering until it became so overwhelming.

My aunt asked me if I dreamed about traveling, and I told her I did. She told me that you had to put the days in at your job to earn the freedom to travel. And you just had to do that one day at a time.