It was cold, slightly rainy, and the sky was completely overcast. So I went for a run. I stepped out into the cold, and the wind was surprisingly refreshing---being a native Arizonan, temperatures below 70F don't usually please me. I ran to Városliget, the park just a couple blocks away from my apartment, and it was absolutely gorgeous. Leaves fell gently from the trees, settling in circles of gold and orange and red around each trunk, and there was that delicate crackling crunch with every step I took. I threw my arms out into the air and let the cold hug me. Yes!, I thought to myself, THIS IS FALL! For people from places where the changes between seasons are distinct, my excitement for nature's expression of Autumn might seem like a bit of an overreaction, but for me, falling leaves is (almost) a completely new experience, and I love it.
I have discovered that whenever I go out for a walk or a run here in Budapest, I find it to be wonderfully refreshing. But being the slight agoraphobe that I am, it takes a lot of effort to stray beyond the comfortable confines of my apartment. And so I have decided to make an official resolution to go out on a walk everyday. No exceptions. It might not always be as extensive as the run/walk I went on today (I was out for over an hour and a half), but I think it would be good for me to get some exercise in. After all, my adopted routine of study-eat-study-eat-sleep has not done wonders for my physique.
In other news, I have recently been getting a lot of emails from the NaNoWriMo people. I hadn't planned on doing it again this year, but with every email I get, the more appealing it becomes. The thing is this: I haven't written anything in the last five months or so, and that is simply way too long to be acceptable. NaNo would be a wonderful way to motivate myself to write, and there would be a whole community of over 100,000 NaNo-ers worldwide (100 of whom are in Budapest) also joining this insane quest to write 50,000 words in the month of November. It would be really interesting to see how doing it for the second time would differ from my experience last year, and I think that if I do decide to do it, I'll aim to write several shorter stories rather than one big work. So, summarizing, the pluses for NaNo are the following: a chance to write, a second NaNo run, and a semi-academic non-math activity. But. I am in Budapest, and doing NaNo would mean: less time to do math, less time to hang out with friends, less time to travel (not that I've been doing much of that, but that might change), less time to sleep. So I'm torn. To NaNo or not to NaNo?
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