Gluttony and quantum mechanics

My dearest husband is out of town as of this morning, and I am already revering to my undergraduate habits of stuffing myself full of starchy sugars late at night and plugging away at quantum mechanics. Part of me hates me for this gluttony; another part of me appreciates the freedom (to stuff myself) and the freer thinking that being home alone seems to afford me from time to time. Of course I can't let this continue indefinitely if I want to fit in my pants in a month, but fortunately Robert's absence is only for 4 days.

I tried cooking the eggplants I purchased on Saturday. They were bitter and not so tasty. My quest to cook eggplants well will soon have to become a real quest, since I love eggplant but seem to be less than successful at preparing them well.

I had two minor epiphanies over the last two days. The first one happened yesterday; it's the more significant of the two. We had a substitute lecturer in quantum, one of our Professor's grad students. I stayed after class and asked him about the dot product of position and momentum space, which was necessary in order to do one of the homework problems. After he helped me over the hurdle I was stuck at, I asked him how to go about thinking about this problem. I basically said "I understand what you did but I would never have come up with it myself. What am I not understanding?" He proceeded to explain basic rotations to me, but I was still confused. So I asked him if there was a good reference to read up on this. His response:

"There are lots of references, but it's far more valuable to try to figure it out for yourself."

Oh my. What a thought. There are several thoughts here, actually. One, that I can figure out for myself what the dot product of position and momentum should be. Not too much to ask I guess, given that someone somewhere had to figure it out for the first time. Second, that I should figure it out. That's reading books and being studious is the intellectually lazy way to go. I suspected that all along, that turning to books when something puzzled me wasn't making me a better scientist, but here it was spelled out for me. Duh! Just because books exist doesn't meet I have to read them. Sometimes I should try to figure out what's in them for myself.

The second epiphany was realizing that I love talking to people, but don't like working with them. I like working independently. Unfortunately, I don't like being alone or lonely; that makes me feel isolated. There is a fine line through the desert of interpersonal communications that must be tiptoed if I am to be a happy and successful graduate student.