slow

Today I feel frustrated. There's a sense of crystalization. Job splits into two parts- a work part and a research part. Not exactly, and its still a little vague, but it feels like its heading towards this.
You create something- a possibility?- and then you live with it. But in the process you don't pursue other options, and I find a heaviness in taking on the option that I've created. I was talking to my dad a few days ago, and describing some of my thoughts and efforts at cleaning up old messes and turning my field into something I can work with. He recommended a book he was reading about two brothers who can't throw anything away, that live in an apartment with everything they have ever collected.

Is this what I do? Just simply refuse to move on? Keep on working with an unworkable situation? In the language of the mess- is the mess simply too big? And even if its not, will there be anything interesting left after the mess is clean?

I feel like its all come to a stop. I reached a point of unstable equilibrium and just sit there, but its a very gradual slope away from this point. There are things I can work on; they are somewhat useful but not urgent. There are half-way interesting research-like questions. But this is my own internal process. Does it match expectations, and categorizations for achievement?

All this digital life continues to bother me (though I participate, such as with this blog). I continue to hear from the computer scientists about optimization and automated search and categorization. And one's activities on social networks become discrete. "So and so did this." "Now they did this." "Oh?" "Yes, they did do that." "Now so and so did this." "Really. That's great! So glad that you told me." Someone tells me about classification of human actions. They describe the "atoms" of action. Tom Waits smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee from a mug, the motion of hand away from mouth, "atomic".