saturday, november 18

•••    this morning I spent over an hour at breakfast playing jeopardy with trivia pursuit cards. (do you have any idea how many possible questions could have the answer "muhammed ali"? or how about "charles darwin"?) when I left I found my roommate watching cartoons. I thought all this was very strange until I realized today is my first saturday without rugby, and up until now I was the one with the abnormal weekend routine. it never occurs to me how different my life is solely because I'm an athlete until I'm temporarily not one. it won't last, anyway -- winter training starts this week. I keep telling myself: the harder I work now, the less broken I will be in the spring after our encounter with navy.

sometimes I have the weirdest clothing impulses, especially on weekends. today... let's just say I'm wearing bright pink socks. they match one of my shirts. also, I have a very evil physics exam sitting on my bed waiting to be tackled. it's one of those untimed open book things so you know it's going to suck. pink socks and evil physics; could I find any more ways to clash today?
12:33 PM +

•••    two domains that really should be put to better use... and one that is just a travesty.

on a wholly unrelated note, I think one of the stupidest things about humans is that we are incapable of understanding the emotional sacrifices we make for one another.
1:24 AM +

friday, november 17

•••    television, I don't get it.

I am breaking all the grammar rules tonight.
9:42 PM +

•••    orange juice tastes better in the dark, and the grinch looks better in ink.
7:20 PM +

•••    you know how when you're walking alone at night, someplace where the only evidence of other humans is the conglomeration of artifacts they construct around themselves, when you cross the street and find yourself caught in a set of approaching headlights, no matter how great the distance is between you and the car, you can feel your mortality wrapping itself around your heart and tethering you ever so tenuously to the world?

I like that feeling.
6:11 PM +

•••    happy thirtieth lunar landing anniversary! no, not that one: in 1970, Luna 17 deployed lunokhod 1 on the surface of the moon. it was the first ever unmanned exploration rover in space, and if you've been paying any attention to mars over the past three years you know that those little rovers have had a rather illustrious career.

yay for exploration. :)
9:06 AM +

•••    look at me, sitting here at 12:30 in the halfdark with my vanilla tea and calorie-packed peanuts, time and the phoenix spread across my desk, lotta love in my headphones, as if I had not a care or a worry in the world.

don't worry, my crisis isn't over. this is just the eye of the storm. but I will take whatever temporary respite is offered, and I will sleep unfitfully tonight.
12:51 AM +

thursday, november 16

•••    isn't it amazing how much better math exams go when you actually study for them? you would think I'd have figured out by now that I'm long past the academic stage where I could construct all I needed to know about a subject just from the material on the exam itself. (yes, that is what I used to do, and don't ask me how it worked because I still don't understand exactly how I made it through all those years of american history without ever failing.) but I haven't, really; I wait until I'm on the verge of complete catastrophe and then I make a mad scramble to recover, and in the end it seems to turn out okay but I would have done so much better (and my fingers would have been so much less nibbled-on) if I had just put some effort into it in the first place. live and never learn. or at least, never learn the important lessons.

so I have this new theory about why I hate math. and it's that I don't actually hate math, I'm not even apathetic about math, I just don't care about my ability to do it anymore. I rather like watching other people do math. most of my fellow physics majors get frustrated with math when it doesn't explain anything concrete, but I enjoy it -- somehow it seems more elegent that way, unencumbered by the pesky details and caveats that abound in the real world.

and, well, as long as I can see how it works, and as long as I know that it can be done, who cares whether I can do it? I can usually set up problems without too much difficulty; it's the evaluation part that screws me up. (three years is a long time to retain all those random integration techniques, especially since I barely bothered to learn them the first time. also, integration by parts is the stupidest name; I always instinctually think it is going to be parts of the region instead of parts of the function.) I know this is a horrible thing to say, but in a world where I can turn on a computer and plug a few commands into mathematica, why does it matter if I can do all these calculations by hand? in some ways I like it better when I can't. sitting down and writing out a bunch of iterated integrals is boring. watching someone else take a big nasty function and turn it into a simple number is weirdly beautiful.

it's sort of like language. I like listening to other people speak in foreign languages, but I can't stand learning them myself. (if there was anything I despised more than history in high school, it was spanish.) and I much prefer listening to languages I don't have an inkling about. I picked up enough spanish in spite of myself that I can generally understand the basic content of a casual conversation, and even listening to things like italian and french and portuguese and german the flow of syllables is interrupted every so often by a jarring blast of word recognition. things like swahili or chinese or hindi, though, I could just sit and listen to forever, because it's just sounds and rhythms. music. if I learned to speak another language that would all fall apart into actual words, and when I learn to do math all the magic flies away until I'm left with just rote and numbers.

(I told my dad that once, about the language thing, and he laughed at me and said it was a copout. mayhaps, but I'll take music over words every day, and is that so wrong? I say he can't hear the music.)
11:49 PM +

•••    (I will always have my sense of humor.)
10:46 AM +

•••    deep breath. composure and sweatpants. rho-squared-sine-phi, I won't forget. new eraser, clean teeth, orange peel smell under fresh sesame street bandaids. no calculator.

dear rabi,
you have more allies than I thought. but you got yourself into this, and you have to get yourself out.
love, the universe

dear universe,
:P
love, rabi

if I make it through this exam without throwing up, I will have scored at least a moral victory. perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
10:10 AM +

•••    I would like you all to know that it was very very nice to come back, after my long night of telescoping and studying and walking in the subfreezing cold, to find a mailbox full of muffin recipes. yum yum.

so it did stay clear, at least marginally, and we took pictures of jupiter and saturn and some random m-objects. (m74 and m1, if you care. and I finally figured out how to properly pronounce "messier," even though it will forever be messy-er in my mind.) we used the really big old (and I mean old! like a hundred years old, almost) 11-meter refractor and it is just damn cool, for many reasons which I suppose I will babble about some other time. it was so much fun that I almost forgot about my sickeningly soon math exam. but then I had to study more, and I remembered, and I went back to feeling ill about it.

I suppose I should go to bed. I have more math to learn but because we spent so much time in the observatory tonight we get tomorrow off from astro class. normally I think I would be upset about this because I rather adore astro class, but tomorrow it's good. or bad, depending on whether I use the extra time for studying or panicking.

or maybe sleeping?
1:58 AM +

wednesday, november 15

•••    
I have new shoelaces and my favorite rock in my pocket, and I decided am going to stick it to the world today.
10:03 AM +

•••    check this out. provided it stays clear, I get to take astronomy pictures tonight, but I'm sure they won't be nearly this breathtaking.

when I get back to cambridge, I am going to figure out how to make vegan blueberry muffins. it's so hard watching them pull the muffin trays out of the oven and smelling the warm cakey blueberry smell as everyone else peels back the paper and bites in. I've been having weird nonvegan cravings lately. I wanted to eat the brownies at lunch yesterday. anyone have a vegan muffin recipe?

dear rabi,
how dare you sleep for six hours and spend a leisurely breakfast reading the new york times when there is still so much math you don't understand? fool!
love, the universe

dear universe,
shush; I am trying to preserve my sanity. besides, I heard you slept with fishes last night. ha!
love, rabi

(by the way, I am studying now. seriously. don't interrupt me. I am going to pass this stupid class.)
8:35 AM +

tuesday, november 14

•••    I had a faceless alien
melting on my tongue
but then I bit his head in half
and with that, he was gone.
9:08 PM +

•••    hello hello blogger...
8:52 PM +

•••    okay so in true rabi fashion I dumped orange-cranberry-sprite cocktail all over the journal article I was reading at dinner. I have spilled my drink more times than I think a high school graduate should be allowed to do in her entire lifetime. at least I only spit a mouthful of juice all over the table on one occasion. (it's dangerous to eat with people. sometimes they make you laugh.)

my article survived, which is good because it's an interlibrary loan copy, so it would have taken a week to get a replacement. I think normally I would have been a little embarassed to have done something so stupid in the middle of the dining hall, but tonight I wasn't especially fazed. I think my sense of dignity is too busy dealing with my current math and physics ineptitude to worry about pithy things like miniature juice tsunamis.

one of the many things I appreciate about astro is that even when I struggle for hours and hours to finish an assignment, I always understand everything by the time I turn it in. yay for astronomy.

dear rabi,
you are going to fail your math exam unless you go study.
love, the universe

dear universe,
okay. I'm going. how about some help in the integration department?
love, rabi
6:26 PM +

•••    rain, grey inside and out, astronomy, msincubedi, nice people, wet wet wet pink flamingos, new pen pals:

dear rabi,
you are a complete idiot. do me a favor and give it up.
love, the universe

dear universe,
go away and leave me alone.
love, rabi

breakfast time. when I am finished going crazy (thanksgiving?) I will tell you all about my new theories on why I am having so much trouble with math. until then, yes, I think my posts are all going to be this random. you don't have to watch if you don't want to.

rain rain rain rain.
7:34 AM +

•••    exercise is hazardous to your health. just stay in bed, why don't you.
6:36 AM +

monday, november 13

•••    someone told me tonight that I have angel eyes. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds nice, doesn't it?
10:45 PM +

•••    okay, as of right now I am officially in all-out-panic-crisis mode, so don't mess with me. okay? okay. freaking school. see you when I see you.
3:55 PM +

•••    this is a very upperclass suburban neighborhood I live in. the house across from me looks like it's at least twice as big as my family's house in cambridge, but as far as I can tell there are only two people living there. their driveway is flanked by little antique lamps on pillars. their hedges are perfectly groomed into flat-topped teacup shapes. their lawn is mowed neater than our baseball diamond, and it has a little winding path made of flagstones set into the ground.

there are two pepto-bismol pink plastic flamingos spiked into the garden next to the driveway. it just looks so wrong.
8:26 AM +

sunday, november 12

•••    this one's for my mom: the best general-interest etymology page I have encountered thus far. check out the explanation for the origins of the word "blurb." also, remind me to incorporate "muckety-muck" into casual conversation at least once during the course of my lifetime.

enough on language. work work workworkworkworkworkworkwork. I think there should be a ling course on etymology -- perhaps that's one sort of history I could learn to like.
8:01 PM +

•••    I like purple.

(I wonder if the netscape people know how much content they're missing out on? if you can call my little popup parentheticals content...)
6:41 PM +

•••    in spite of all the work I'm supposed to be doing, I somehow let myself get talked into playing in an intramural flag football tournament today. we came in second place, by virtue of being one of only two teams that had legal rosters. we were also the only team that wasn't composed entirely of guys over six feet tall. it was fun.
3:28 PM +

•••    last night I had all these wacky dreams (or maybe it was one extended wacky dream) about doing crazy things like skydiving and waterskiing on my hands and swimming out to a military ship to climb up the hull. the distinctive thing about all these activities was that I didn't have anything even resembling the proper attire. I think I was wearing iridescent silk pants and chinese shoes for the swimming escapade, and my high school soccer uniform for skydiving, with bare feet. then when I woke up I had heaven is a place on earth stuck deep in my head. huh.
10:48 AM +