2024/december/21.

Too much time is wasted. I tried thinking of how to study until exhaustion, but it's hard to disobey the body when it is requesting you to take a break. Then, it's also common knowledge how spaced learning and giving yourself time to breathe is important. I want to take my chances against those good practices.
The university's calendar is messed up due to a strike that occurred in the beginning of the year, so I will have two weeks off to learn how to work hard and organize things. Too much time is wasted, I'm already behind.

Thursday, after finishing our studies about universal algebra, with the help of some coffee and cake, my professor and I talked about the differences between the universities where I live and in St. Petersburg. Though I don't nourish much love for my country, I'm grateful for the opportunities given to me here, and I'm especially fond of the "countryside" feeling (even if the campus is amidst a metropolis) things have here. The bottom line is that I have to be gratuful, I have to exercise being grateful.

2024/december/16.

This is so obvious that it hurts my head just to write it down, but I have the critical task of filling the gaps in knowledge permeating my thoughts if I want to stop feeling bad for not knowing things I should. “Tudo bem,” I may be a fish out of water, which means that this process will take longer for me than it would for people who are at their right place, but I hope to find a way. The real difficulty lies in not failing for the same laziness that deprives me of feeling worth something. My solution to this will be to try to win myself by exhaustion, to try to change in an ordinate way by a countable number of infinite tries. Though it’s a bit silly to write this, it may help to add a layer of shame for writing something and then just doing the complete opposite, so this silly blog entry may help, after all.

2024/december/15.

Took a sip of soda from a tiny plastic cup. Ate a bit of cake. Nodded and smiled with my one-sided tight smile. We were all standing around a small, white, round table. Talking, eating, and sometimes laughing. The room tasted like cassava cake and Coca-Cola. Everyone had their hands full, each with its own cup, holding barehanded its own piece of cake as someone forgot to buy napkins. Those, like me, who were out of subject, could easily be entertained by the leftovers of a research-level algebra seminar displayed on the whiteboard in front of us.

Then, this woman leans over, opposite to me, says something undistinguishable, and a voice answers, “He is professor's Anatoly student from the scientific initiation.” That made my day, my week, and maybe even my month. If it were completely true, it would be worth a year. The last months behind me were filled with the desire of having a scientific initiation, being part of a small project, with the wish to write a small mathematical contribution, with the wish to work. Thus, imagine the joy of realizing that you're craving something you already have, are already experiencing. This made me deeply happy. Though I don't think it is part of the “Algebra with Coffee” meeting's intentions to make me produce something, and even though I don't think it will count as being “complementary hours” in the university’s eye, that simple phrase gave me a lot of peace. To look at this period as the first stage of an undergraduate research changed things for the better.