# Hump Day Math Day

Well, it’s Wednesday.

Generally, Wednesday is the cause for much joy because it means the terrible Mondays and Tuesdays are things of the past and that the future – those Fridays and Saturdays – are right around the corner. It makes sense, then, that Wednesdays would be good work days too: It should intuitively mean that the drag-assery of Mondays and Tuesdays has subsided and that the “time flies when you’re having fun” of Fridays and Saturdays has caught hold.

That hasn’t been the case here on the math front, today.

I’ve spent the better part of the morning and afternoon battling a migraine, which means I’ve held out on the “read new books” front (so long, Kobayashi and Nomizu…) and have instead been leisurely contemplating some of the unfinished problems from algebraic topology (…and hellllllllllo, Dr. Hatcher!). I’ve made some progress (read: I’ve done two problems), but it’s definitely not something to write home about.

But hey: Some days you’re the dog and some days you’re the hydrant.

I’ve finally reached the cluster of Hatcher problems dealing with CW complexes, and because I’m so genuinely awful at them, I’m going to take some time to read around and try to get a better grasp before moving forward. I have a good general idea and I can usually do some problems / work with the things themselves, but I always have a hard time processing the technical details thereof. Something about that whole connecting $n-1$ cells to $n$ cells by way of continuous maps that do some stuff on the boundary and yadda yadda yadda just never has settled with my brain cells.

And that, friends, is the point of summer: To force unsettled things to settle.