Virtual bar

I stayed up to hear the results of the US presidential elections the other night. It was thrilling, and goes without saying that I believe that the right candidate won.

I went to a talk on "Vanishing cycles of holomorphic foliations by curves and foliated shells" today, which was given by my Russian officemate. It was fantastic. I imagine that he is an absolutely wonderful lecturer- he had a brilliant way of making everything accessible! I don't understand why I always seem to enjoy/understand more in seminars which are unrelated to my area than those which are on it? I can barely last 20 minutes in seminars on Algebraic Geometry and Arithmetic Number theory. There was a graduate student mini-course on "group cohomology" today and that was just horrific. I know the basics of group cohomology, but I (and the other students that I spoke to about it afterwards) thought it was going to be a mini-course on understanding it better, not assuming flawless knowledge (or at least a working knowledge) of it... which it seemed to.. There seems to be this virtual bar of knowledge that is implicitly assumed here and anything below this bar will never ever be explained! Unfortunately I am not sure where the bar lies, all I know is that I lack ALOT of the knowledge below this bar!

Conclusion: I feel more stupid than ever.

I spent all of this morning lost in the city, trying to find the graduate school to hand it a form with basically just my name on because it was essential that they had it before tomorrow. I returned to the institute to find the receptionist armed with a camera clamoring to take my photograph. Damn, I thought she has forgotten about that. I successfully have managed to avoid having it done for 4 weeks .. but now.. eugh .. my image has been captured for the photoboard.. and it is a "I'm very flustered , red-faced, hideous" image.