the world has turned and left me here

in hibernation

Went skiing (count the i's, there's two of 'em) in the Austrian Alps these last few days. It's not quite ski season yet as most of the mountain slopes don't have snow. But above the Tux valley in South Tirol there's a glacier called Hintertux that's good for year-round skiing.

Of course my ski ability was pretty pathetic compared to the Austrians, most of whom were probably skiing before they were walking. (Shoot probably everything in the Alps knows how to ski, from babies to small furry animals to blocks of cheese.) Wednesday was a beautiful day up on the glacier and I got a lot of skiing in. Thursday was not so great--even though it looked okay down in the valley, there was a bad snowstorm up on the glacier and they weren't running the lifts. Rather than hang around in my hotel room for another night reading I decided to get out of Vorderlanersbach. As I left I realized that, over the past two days, I had probably spoken a total of 50 words to other human beings. What was so strange about this was that it didn't strike me as strange.

It's the old language thing again. Just when my German is starting to get passable I throw myself in with a bunch of Tirol Austrians who are supposed to speak German, but in actuality speak some sort of weird Russian-Italian-sounding German, which I could hardly understand a word of most of the time. Sheesh, and I thought a strong Bavarian dialect was bad!

As a result there was a lot of time to think. The point of the trip, for me, was not to think--to act, for a change. But there were so many hours spent on trains, buses, lifts, and in my hotel room that I could not really properly escape from thinking. Aside from the exciting moments on the slopes, the whole experience was tainted by a sort of purposelessness...I knew that I had to get away from it all, but at the same time once I'm "away from it all" there isn't really any strong motive or desire behind anything.

I thought that the dream was dead. Dead in the only way that dreams can be killed, from the inside. But it's just in hibernation. I must recover, forget--forgetting is one thing I'm damn good at--and then try again. Still, experiences are not just something that I wish to pile up between me and the past, in order to obstruct my view of it. They are the raw material out of which I create things. Erdos said it: "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." In my case replace "coffee" with "experiences" and "theorems" with "software" and there you have it.