More chips? No, no, I couldn't possibly ...

As a kid, my parents made me play the violin. This because my grandfather played and my father always wanted to play.

Me? I wanted to watch Tom and Jerry, tap dance on the sidewalk, dig holes in the dirt, and chase the ice cream truck. So practicing was never a priority for me even when my violin teachers scolded me to tears and wrote nasty letters to my mother. I have always been lazy and undisciplined. Getting me to pick up that damn instrument was a fierce battle waged between me and my mother for 8 years. (I don't know why she did it.) My ability to read music and be somewhat in tune with others, I owe to my mother.

Everyday she would march me into my room, open the violin case, and sternly insist that I practice for 30 minutes. I would counter that I was hungry and needed a snack. My mother cannot bear the thought of a hungry child, so I got a snack. A temporary reprieve from the horrors of practicing scales and Mazas or Seitz (yes, like the bologna). I wasn't really hungry but I stuffed my gullet to stave off the inevitable.

And now in the face of my thesis, I am a mill horse making circles in an open field. Same song and dance, different unpleasant task. I get all hyped up to work on a figure, writing a new section, or revising an old section and then I find that I am hungry. For instance today, I have eaten enough to be uncomfortably full. The kind of full where if the room is too cold my stomach hurts and if the room is too warm I feel queasy. The kind of full where I think I can feel the food at the top of my throat. Because I can't possibly track down the right references with out sustenance. =P

All this is to say that I see what I am doing and understand why I am doing it yet I can't stop myself from doing it again.