One Day in History

Today, hopefully thousands of people contribute to the British Library blog and help them record "One Day in History". You can also sign a declaration and post your views about why history matters, but that's an ongoing campaign. Tuesday, October 17th 2006, they wanted people to upload their blogs, or just write about their day, for the future generations.

Here's what I wrote.

A working day at the Faculty of Music in Cambridge, as usual. Seems that a PhD student trying to write up never gets a day off. Even at weekends the voice inside keeps nagging to me... It used to be that Mondays were the awful, as the whole working week was still ahead, while Fridays brought relief. Now it's the other way around - Mondays feel OK for the very reason that the whole working week is still ahead, while on Fridays you realise that yet another week has passed without not much visible progress. Time surely flies, as the deadlines crash one after another... Graduate guilt - must end soon.

Today was good, though. Progress in work, finishing some reading I needed to get done. More importantly though, the first supervisions for undergraduates taking the "Introduction to Music and Science" -course. Teaching is great, as you get to interact with people rather than just immerse yourself in your own world. It's also like mwoing lawns or sweeping footpaths - you get an immediate gratification for being able to answer the students' questions.

Now I'm preparing for a seminar - some dynamic systems stuff on interpersonal interaction, how body movements of two interlocutors can be plotted together and analysed in dynamic terms and then it shows how they are synchronised... making the obvious visible in quantifiable terms. Interesting but might be just a fancy and complicated way of telling what everyone knows already. but if that's what it takes to convince a cognitivist that communication is about bodies and that the meaning is constucted in human-human interaction, so be it.

It's also my father's birthday, so I called him - they are in Lapland, and I'm not at all envious... Oh, I must remember to write a blog entry about the One Day in History to my own blog as well.