Happy 2008!!!

Happy New Year!!!
(At least lets hope it will be a happy year.)

Another year has come and gone. 2007 is over and 2008 has just started. It has being my 3rd new year in Japan. The next one (2009) must be the last, at least for this time. (Who knows about the future?) Last year my family was here, so I could be with Karin and the kids on Christmas and new year. It was so good to be with them, to feel family at the holidays again. But this year they were not. I was with friends, but I felt alone. Don't take me wrong, I do like my friend and it was very good to be with them (don't even want to think how would I have felt if I haven't them around), but I still missed my family.

Anyway, I thought it would be better to go out on new years than stay alone at home. So, I went to Ageha with some friends (Adri, Lina, Kixpe e Zauder). Ageha is advertised as the biggest dance club in Asia, and the place is really big. On new years it was crowded. Really, really crowded. But it was worth. The music was good (except for the DJ at the pool site that expended more time talking that playing music -- but the other sites were OK), there was a fair amount of beautiful people, and there were special shows. On the entrance there were some 5 or 6 girls doing pole dancing, not like that we see in B movies, they was not naked, but using sexy clothes, and they was indeed giving a show, even the girls stopped to watch. 10 minutes before midnight a DJ/Drag Queen started his/her/its own show for the countdown. And it was a good show too. The guy knew how to do his/her/its show. At midnight every body hugged each other, there was balloons and colored paper falling and everybody was happy. It was a happy night.

Harumi, I, Kixpe and Lina at Kita-senju station, in our way to Ageha. Zauder joined us at Shin-kiba station.

The other remarkable event from this beginning of year is that yesterday was Kixpe's birthday. We should have joined for a small party at Robson's house, but for different reasons most of the people invited had to cancel at the last minute. So I, Kixpe, Adri, Robson and Nelia (Robson's girlfriend) went out for a dinner at TonQ.

Robson, Kixpe, Harumi and I waiting for a place at TonQ to celebrate Kixpe's birthday. Nelia is taking the picture.

Despite the new year's party at Ageha, and the atmosphere of celebration of this time of the year, I don't feel so good. Actually, after Christmas and my shodan exam, I am feeling pretty bad. I had a meeting with my adviser just before Christmas, he was very clear about the status of my research, and it is not good. I expended the last year trying to develop a new method for model checking multi-valued models. (Don't bother about what exactly is that, it's important just for me.) I finally have perfected the new method and I can handle very huge models now. I was excited about this, because I thought it would be the whole point of my Ph.D. research. My adviser thinks differently. He told me he is disappointed I have took so long to work on this method; that he suggested it just because he thought it would be good to work with it since nobody had done it before, but that this, alone, is in no way enough to justify a Ph.D. degree. That I will have to think about some new direction for my research, and it have to be something that gives solid results in the next 4 to 5 months, otherwise I will much probably not be able to graduate on March, 2009, as it is scheduled.

In less than 30 minutes of meeting I came from extreme excitement and happiness to the most complete frustration and despair. I have no idea of which new direction I can give to my research, I have no clue about where to look for inspiration, I have no idea at all of what I am gonna do.

Besides all that, I have to finish writing a paper with deadline on January 11th. The paper will be a revised version of the one I presented in November, on a workshop in Kyoto. It should be easy as a Sunday morning, but it's not. My sensei, said he doesn't like the way I organize my papers. To him they looks like a text book: much theory and fundamental concepts in the beginning and finally my conclusions. To him it's boring. There are no "catch phrases", or other exciting things to keep the attention and interest of the reader. He wants me to correct that. In the last days I have being crawling after examples of good papers, trying to identify some pattern of how to write an exciting theoretical paper about multi-valued temporal logics (for real, I almost laugh only to think about the contradiction in terms that this sentence is) . On top of that, he also wants me to provide some meaningful example that show that my method is not only applicable but also useful, in the sense that the example must be more easily or naturally solvable by my method than by the traditional one. It is probably not hard to grasp that up to now I have not being successful.

Karin, has tried to help me and looked for some references too. Two of the references she sent me gave some insights, but I don't know if these insights will be enough to finish the paper as my sensei expects. I have a meeting with him on Monday. I just wish I would die before that so I don't have to face him and tell him I failed on doing what he expected. I hate to fail! I really, really hate to fail. It hurts my self-esteem. Makes me feel unfit and unworthy. Just the thought that failure is unavoidable makes me loose control. I'm not being able to sleep well, or work well because I'm stressed.

When I was a project manager in ISH I keep track of the progress of all projects. I always was able to identify potential risks weeks before something actually happened and take measures to prevent it: renegotiate deadlines, allocate more resources, review the distribution of tasks and so on. No project I have managed ever failed. Now I have no flexibility at all. I can not allocate more resources. I can not negotiate deadlines. I may not do anything but work as hard as I can force myself to. And it's not being enough.

I don't know what to do.

P.S. I am probably being too much dramatic here, OK? I am stressed, frustrated, tired and I have not trained Aikido for a while (it's winter vacation until next week), so I could not alleviate my frustration throwing people in the floor. Don't take me too seriously. I will be better in a few weeks.