So, my building thinks it’s on fire. That is, the alarm has been going off for about an hour now. And I have a midterm tomorrow.
RING RING RING.
Of course, the fire dept couldn’t turn it off. They need someone from MAC to do it. In other words, it will not get done.
RING RING RING.
So we called the “emergency” hotline for MAC property. They said they’d send someone right over. This was some forty-five minutes ago.
RING RING RING.
Never again, MAC apartments. Never again.
RING RING RING.
I haven’t written in a while. So let’s get down to the meat-and-potatoes.
So, I went to a throat specialist, and he said I have no problems. My lymph nodes [which have been swollen for something like, a month and a half] are probably just doing it because they like doing it. Either way, he gave me Biaxin, which is gigantic in pill-form, and told me to take them for 7 days. And then he told me to come back and see him IN MID-JULY. Ugh, so far away. This thing bothers the hell out of me.
Besides that, I’ve been okay. I’ve been trying to keep up with classes and all, but it’s really difficult. Algebraic topology is a real bitch, and the homework takes so long. The assignment was due today, but I still haven’t gotten most of the problems! Agh. Oh well.
Complex and algebra are still kind of fun. Algebra midterm on friday. It feels like we really didn’t cover much, though, so it’s kind of…I’m unsure of how to feel about it. Complex is next thursday. I need to really study because the homework has been sort of find-theorem-to-use and plug-in-numbers. So, really, I need to work on that.
I have a love-hate relationship with people who think they’re too smart to go to school. On one hand, I admire them because of their bravery in not playing by the rules — you know, not getting stuck in the corporate machine. On the other hand, I hate them because they think that by not going to school, they’ll get more done. Maybe this is true at some colleges, but I know that if I wasn’t working in college right now, I would not know 1\100th of the things I know now. Math or otherwise. Working alone is fine, and I try to do a lot of independent work to keep my mind active and to not get bored with maths, but I think that some things are just easier to learn if you learn it from someone who already knows it. Especially in the sciences, since much of the work is so abstract that it’s difficult to form a picture of it in your head — so it’s nice to see how other people who already’ve worked in the field for a while think of it.
Even in the sort of gender-studies, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, english, history, etc. fields, I feel it would benefit individuals to go to school. I don’t know as much about these, but I know that taking one class on Freud was better for my understanding of his theory than reading the whole book by myself. It’s just nice to know WHAT to read and WHAT is important and WHAT isn’t — I do like to read books on my own, but it’s difficult to differentiate what is important from what isn’t. Case in point: reading Hegel by myself was virtually undo-able. I wasn’t able to find a teacher here to go over it with me [because i didn't look] but I was able to find a lesson plan and lecture notes from another university’s class on Hegel. It helped a lot to know what to skim over and what was important, as well as what the teacher thought of Hegel. But, even this isn’t the best possible way, I feel, to learn about Hegel. There is no back-and-forth with another person who knows about Hegel.
What I mean, here, is — I had an argument with someone in highschool over whether college was necessary. One of the points they brought up was that you can really just read lecture notes and things [esp. the MIT website which has "open courses" with often-videotaped lectures] and learn the subject. While this may be true for many individuals, and while this may be true at those who are already sufficiently learned in the field that they’re studying [eg: Now I can sit down and read a book about curves and sort of "get" everything -- but that's just because I've had so many other classes drilling similar ideas into my head.], it is often NOT true for individuals getting started in any particular field. There is, I feel, a necessary back-and-forth that needs to take place between someone who “gets it” and someone who doesn’t. So why can’t you just talk to your friend about Hegel or vector spaces or whatever? You can. But I feel this isn’t as effective as the disciplinary system that many universities have set up. Why care about grades if they’re not going to grad school? It’s a completely arbitrary system — but on the most part, it works. It motivates work. And working motivates more work. I never thought that I could do so much work until I came to the university and actually *did* [or. tried to.] do it. It’s insane. I used to think that reading a section of math a night was a lot. Now I’ve got to read whole chapters a night just to supplement the normal stuff I need to be doing.
Point? The back-and-forth between a friend is not nearly motivating enough, I feel. And one person even brought up to me, “yeah, but can’t you find a friend who’s teaching a class? or make friends with a teacher?” Then besides the money, what’s the difference between this and going to classes? Well, I guess the classes part — and the saving money part — but I feel that to be against university learning and then going to a university professor or even a teacher for help on problems is like being a vegan on principle but eating meat because you need the vitamins. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I guess.
I guess what I’m really trying to say in all of this is: you have no right to be pretentious and all-knowing, kid. I do. So suck it.
But speaking of pretentiousness, I’m trying to go over Category Theory now — and it’s really incredible. I took out some Intro to Category Theory book, and it’s surprisingly readable. I suggest that anyone who hasn’t been introduced to it yet, get into it. It’s kind of cool.
Oh. And Hegel, Sartre, Deleuze, Nietzsche, etc, etc, etc, reading that my lazykingmonarchy was talking about? That’ll have to wait. I’m reading through Hegel now, but I can only do a little bit at a time, so obviously I won’t be able to even get into anything major until, at least, the summer. Or maybe I’ll just cop out again and forget it. Ugh.
Lastly, because of its surprisingly accessible nature, I feel like everyone should learn a little number theory. I’m going to try to start putting little exercises at the end of my posts again: try to answer them! I promise to not make them too hard. Here’s one that I was thinking about the other day in complex:
Produce a formula for the sum of the numbers from 0 or 1 to n such that no number in the sum contains the digit r = 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, or 9.
For example. Take r = 4. The sum from 0 to 20 is:
0+1+2+3+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13+15+16+17+18+19+20 = [(19)(20) \ 2] – (4 + 14).
So for numbers like this, you may have a nice formula. But consider r = 1 from 0 to 20. Then
0 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 20 = [(19)(20)/2] – (10 + 11 + 12 + … + 19 + 1).
Hint: for a start, try 0. Then you just take out every multiply of 10.
On the first nice day all year, I get sunburnt.
Sweet deal.
Holy crap. Wednesday is going to be almost 70 degrees.
Oh, god, I love springtime. I never want to see the winter again.
I never ever ever ever ever want to see the winter again.
Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever.
Until next year.
This marks the first day, ever, that I’m done with my homework early.
Now watch me sleep through class anyway.
(tomorrow is Field Extensions Friday, and I couldn’t be happier.)
Always there for me. Always supportive. Calms me down in tough situations. Goes everywhere with me. We do everything together.
I feel kind of like a cyborg or something. But less metal. When I was little, I would always look forward to being done with medicine — and when I was able to swallow pills, I always would rattle around the bottle and think, “almost done! almost done!” It was really exciting.
But now, with zoloft, and, to a lesser degree, lorezepam, it seems to be lifelong — or at least, long-time — companionship. I can’t really shake the bottle around, because I know that when I run low, I just need to go and get more.
And god forbid I run low on Ativan — because then I have to see a doctor (going outside once, at least.) then go to the pharmacy (going outside twice.) and then possibly picking it up (going out THREE TIMES?!). It feels absolutely unreal to me now. Whenever I go outside, I think, “this is actually costing me money to do — I’m paying to go outside. this pretty much sums up a near-endstate to capitalism.” And, you know, people talk a lot about not remembering “how they used to be” before they started zoloft or prozac or whatever — and they’ll say, “I used to be so depressed, but now I can’t see how I was depressed before…” or something. It’s a little bit different for me, though, because I wasn’t depressed. I remember how I was before. It’s exactly the same as I am now, when I’m in my room. Or when I feel comfortable. But I don’t remember what it’s like to go outside just for the sake of going outside and not having to sedate myself to do so.
It’s getting pretty hard for me to remember just being able to go outside my door, get on my bike, ride to class, and be calm for the entire time.
I was reading an old post of mine, where I said I got to the point where riding the red line was just *boring* instead of anxiety-ridden. And it’s that kind of memory that I fondly remember: being *bored* by things.
If I’m sitting in class, and nothing is going on, I get so anxious. I just fidget around. I think I can’t breathe. Or I check my breathing which makes me manually breathe, which I hate doing. So if a class gets boring, I start to try to prime factorize in my head. Or I look at numbers and try to think of how many times I need to add the digits together to get a single digit number. And then I try to make classes of numbers that stop at a certain number (for example, 71 stops at 8, 17 stops at 8, 44 stops at 8, etc.) and try to find similarities between the numbers. It turns out that it’s just the integers mod 9.
1; 10; 19; 28; 37; 46; 55; 64; 73; 82; 91; 100…
2; 11; 20; 29; 38; 47; 56; 65; 74; 83; 92; 101…
3; 12; 21; 30; 39; 48; 57; 66; 75; 84; 93; 102…
4; 13; 22; 31; 40; 49; 58; 67; 76; 85; 94; 103…
5; 14; 23; 32; 41; 50; 59; 68; 77; 86; 95; 104…
6; 15; 24; 33; 42; 51; 60; 69; 78; 87; 96; 105…
7; 16; 25; 34; 43; 52; 61; 70; 79; 88; 97; 106…
8; 17; 26; 35; 44; 53; 62; 71; 80; 89; 98; 107…
9; 18; 27; 36; 45; 54; 63; 72; 81; 90; 99; 108…
I think that’s why I want to take algebraic topology so badly. It’s so new, so complex, so challenging that I need to constantly pay attention and can’t think about anything else.
But maybe I just have hyped up algebraic topology for so long that I’d feel like a failure if I dropped it.
But, I mean. I can prove that for any continuous function from the circle to the circle has a fixed point via showing that we’d need to rip apart a disk for it not to be true. And I mean, what the shit? That’s awesome.
As the weather is getting nicer, I can’t help but think about last year. Last summer. Last spring. Everything just seems so bizarre. I remember everything as kind of a blur smeared around three or four major events. It seems almost unreal. It seems like a story that I told myself so many times that I just started believing it was true. I feel like I’m back in second year and that the “real” second year never happened — I’m back to square one.
I always sort of laugh and joke about the fact that certain people here really don’t like me. It doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it used to. And I think I’ve grown, now that I don’t hang out with the same ol’ crew as I used to. I don’t really define myself by my sexuality the way I once did. I don’t really feel the need to constantly be around people, constantly be talking to people, or constantly be comforted by people.
Let’s take that last point: I think that one of the toughest things that happens to you when you lose friends is that a large hunk of your time is sort of freed up. You can’t really say, “oh, I’ll call X and have lunch,” or “oh, i’ll see what Y is up to,” if you don’t really have too many friends. Now I find myself loafing around and reading my classwork stuff. And I think back to what it was like before, where I would spend hours hanging out with people and chatting about basically nothing. I don’t really know which is better. Honestly, it’s a tough choice.
Most of all, though, I think I miss having someone who would care if I were dying. That sounds a bit morbid, I know, but most of my chums now, I feel, would not go to the ends of the earth to see that I was feeling better. And, I mean, they shouldn’t have to. This is something that not even a best friend should really be required to do.
When you live alone, though, you think differently than when you live with people. Sometimes I go to bed and I wonder what would happen if I started choking and just couldn’t get up. I would just die there. I couldn’t call for anyone. What if my phone was too far away? Who would find me? No one is really expecting me, except my classmates. It would be days. Weeks.
But things became unreasonable eventually. You need to weigh your options. How do you feel most of the time because of it.
And that’s what’s nice about lorezepam. I feel sedated most of the time because of it. It’s like I’m constantly walking through a dream. Honestly, that’s what it feels like now. There’s no “real” part of my day anymore.
But I think it’s just as well, because it was reality that I couldn’t stand in the first place.
Yeah, so, heston’s dead.
It’s weird. I guess I never really think of people like that as being able to be killed.
Oh well. Guess all we can do now is pry those guns out of his cold, dead hands.
Okay, I finished one of my problem sets, so I have some time to update.
Lately, I’ve been really tired. I don’t know what the deal is, but I think I’m just taking some time to get used to the school schedule. I mean, during spring break, I was wakin’ up at 4pm and going to bed at 6am. I’m a night owl. Hoot.
Now, as far as classes go: this is the first time that every single one of my classes is TA’d be a friend of mine. It’s kind of strange. I’m actually pretty content: complex, so far, is pretty easy and algebra should be fine after this stupid PID crap. Algebraic Topology is hard, but it’s sort of rewarding — I don’t know how to explain it. It’s sort of like — well, when I learn something in algebra, I’m like, “oh, cool, that’s neat, but it’s not too surprising, it makes sense, etc.” but when I learn something in algebraic topology, I’m like, “Okay. Wait, did we prove it? How? Wait, that mapping proves it? How? Seriously? What does that have to do with — oh. Oh, wait. I see. Okay. But, it doesn’t really — okay. Oh. No, yeah, you’d have to tear it, I guess. Okay. So, there does exist — okay. Uh. Okay.” And then a few hours of hard studying later, I finally go, “oh. That’s kind of neat.”
It blows my mind.
It’s really an incredible field. We’re proving crazy stuff using really simple ideas. It’s just the writing-it-down that’s going to kill me.
We’ll see. I can’t drop it, ’cause otherwise I’m only in 2 classes. So I either pass or die.
Why do we want computers with AI?
What’re we going to do after we get them? Sloth around?
No, really, someone tell me.
I got accepted into the University of Chicago Math REU!
Now I need to decide what I want to do: spend my summer doing math here or crying at home.
