saturday, december 16

•••    I ran out of normal bandaids (as far as little plastic strips covered in muppets can be considered normal), and I've had to resort to using wildlife tattoo bandaids to treat my stress-injured fingertips. now I have sharks and killer whales wrapped around my fingers, thrashing about in an apparently futile attempt to catch their tails in fearsome toothy jaws.

one of the nice things about dreary grey weather is that it begets clusters of colorful nylon umbrellas lying around in foyers and hallways, facing up like newly-bloomed pansies that have just pushed through the flowerbed soil in springtime. only because they are not only colorful but also often striped or polkadotted or screenprinted, they also look like they belong in a fantasy world from a children's storybook, where lollipops grow on trees and little elves cavort about the gardens.

our christmas cactus is flowering. crossed fingers for an open flower before we leave. 7:54 PM

•••    at the bookstore there was a woman who seemed to be having an irritating day. she was carrying a gigantic stack of stuff that kept sliding around, and the line to the cashiers was uncommonly long. I offered to help her with her pile, but she seemed so offended by the suggestion that I was intimidated away from my plan to tell her that the line was moving pretty fast in spite of appearances. she wanted the whining children to shut up. she wanted the people conversing in spanish to be quieter so she could hear herself think. I rather wanted to be standing somewhere else.

I was quietly counting out twenties, watching andrew jackson's disarmingly intense green gaze slip past me and past me and past me again, when a mild ruckus began at the next register over. the woman was upset because the teenager behind the counter was refusing to wrap and ship her packages for her. your policy is anywhere in the united states, she was snipping at him. are you telling me that's a lie? to his credit, the cashier was being ridiculously polite to her, moreso than I would have been able to manage. he apologized over and over: I'm sorry, ma'am, we can't send packages to prisons. they just get sent back again.

I don't know. if the recipients of my gifts were in prison and everyone around me was happy and chattering and busy, I might be irritated with the world too. especially on such a gloomy rainy day as today. 3:27 PM

•••    I am going christmas shopping in the rain. I thought I would wait until monday because I figured there would be less people shopping on monday, but then I realized that I have nothing technically due until tuesday, and knowing my procrastination abilities and my lack of prioritizing abilities it will likely get to be monday before I've made significant headway on my psych final (which is a four thousand word takehome with a fifteen hour time limit). so I'm going today, because I don't think people would be too thrilled if I told them I couldn't get them presents because I was writing about natural selection. I'm dressed all in loose floppy denim and outside it's dark and wet and slick, so I feel that it is the absolute antithesis of christmas, but I am going to do my best anyway. 11:19 AM

•••    when I woke up this morning everything seemed to be foggy, but I couldn't tell if the fog was inside or outside my head. do you think if I run far enough I'll leave me sleepyness behind? 10:05 AM

•••    tonight I have been sitting in front of my computer with my stuffed penguin cradled in my lap as if it were a sleeping child. I ate dairy-free chocolate that came in a silver-wrapped box with my name written in familiar handwriting on the outside and a heart-signed note on the inside. I listened to songs from the muppet christmas carol and sang along in whispered soprano. it's all about the comfort things.

one of the things my parents did exactly right was nighttime stories. my mother read to me almost every night after I was old enough to comprehend language, and she kept doing it for eight years after I had learned to read to myself. I remember when we read a christmas carol. I think I was six. there was one night when I built a tent out of the orange wedge-shaped couch cushions and a fuzzy brown blanket and hid inside while my mother read about scrooge's encounter with jacob marley. I fell asleep in the middle of a chapter, and when I woke up I was disoriented by the bright living room lights and the blanket suspended a few inches above my nose. my mother chided me for getting so distressed and said that drifting off in the middle of a story had to be one of the nicer ways to fall asleep. in retrospect I think she's probably right, but at the time I couldn't be convinced.

now I fall asleep in the middle of reading all the time, but it's usually something much less interesting than christmas ghosts and bad gravy puns. 2:39 AM

friday, december 15

•••    my mail made me cry today, but it also made me smile. I do not deserve my friends. 9:45 PM

•••    why is it that I can do hard things like calculate the flux of a vector field through a disgustingly complicated surface, but I can't do stupidly easy things like find a vector parallel to a tangent plane? (answer: physics. I care about physics, therefore I learn it. I do not particularly care about learning math. sad how that works.) anyway. three hours and twenty scribble-filled pages that will hopefully mark the end of my career in pure math are now behind me. hallefreakinglujah.

and now... on to astronomy! would you believe me if I said I am looking forward to my review session this afternoon? this is what makes all that math worth every bit of the blood and frustration it caused. yes yes.

I will have something less absorbed to say sometime, I promise. just not soon. 1:00 PM

•••    the best part of finals is being finished. I haven't gotten that far yet.

the second best part is the primal scream, which takes place at the midnight before the first day of finals. we screamed for a whole minute. (apparently someone warns the neighbors of our off-campus dorm, or else I'm sure we would be visited by the borough police for disturbing the peace or something.) screaming at the top of your lungs is a great stress reliever, and going out into the cold night air is a good way to wake up. so now I have blood and adrenaline pumping and I'm all set to get back to math. woot.

one of these semesters I am going to scream inside the library. it must sound incredible. 12:07 AM

thursday, december 14

•••    look, I'm famous. or something like that. ;) yet another reason why I love my astro professor. 10:34 PM

•••    don't let my obvious astronomy obsession mislead you. I'm also a big poetry geek, and very preoccupied with the aesthetic qualities of things in general. if I weren't an astro major I would be an english major. and then I would graduate and have absolutely no idea what to do with myself. I want to write but I don't think I could ever really make a living doing it, or even keep myself completely satisfied with it. I would want to be doing other things too. that's the nice thing about writing; you get to do it even if you don't have a degree. astronomy research with telescope time, on the other hand, is a little less accessible for the layperson.

and speaking of that, today is the anniversary of the very first successful planetary flyby, completed in 1962 by mariner 2 around venus. we've come a long way, haven't we? it's hard to imagine that just half a century ago we barely even knew what the planets looked like.

so yeah, my math final is in thirteen hours and I have only just gotten to the point where I am confident I remember how to do all the things I actually understood the first time we learned them. we are allowed to bring cheat sheets but no calculators to this exam, which is making me think it is going to have a lot of problems whose solutions depend on intuitive leaps and mathematical creativity. in other words, the sorts of things that are impossible to learn in a day or a week, and which I have not yet acquired. blah.

but I did get a kiss on the forehead and three whole hugs today, so I am still thinking I'm an okay person, somewhere inside my shell of math-incompetence and self-doubt. 8:25 PM

•••    and then it got warm. and the air outside smelled good and fresh and alive. but it didn't matter at all because everyone was stuck inside studying. 1:51 PM

•••    yesterday it hailed and my footsteps crunched on the sidewalk; it was like walking on bubble wrap only without the satisfying feeling that comes with destroying something inconsequential. then it got inexplicably warmer, and all night long it rained. by the time I went running this morning, it had stopped actively precipitating, but there was still so much moisture in the barely-above-freezing air that everything was coated in evaporation-immune water. so the world glistened: the cars with reflected sunlight, the trees with trapped rain, and me with sweat.

I feel as though we are all living in the trail left behind by a herd of mammoth slugs that has slithered off in search of a better world.

the glare on my monitor is so bright that I can't actually see what I'm writing, which is probably a good thing at this point. 12:13 PM

•••    we all needed a break. so we watched the wizard of oz, with dark side of the moon. some of the people here are real technophiles, so we had wizard digitally projected onto the blank lounge wall and darkside looping on really nice speakers. perhaps the synchronicity has gotten more attention than it deserves, but it's worth watching at least once just for the whole munchkinland sequence.

of course being college students and swatties in particular, we also had a lengthy discussion about cognitive dissonance and sexual tension and gender-role symbolism in the movie. and, since the movie didn't have words, we recited the best lines in chorus: "I'm melting! oh, what a world, what a world!"

I do love college. I just hate finals. 2:10 AM

wednesday, december 13

•••    ha -- if you are satisfied only by a's, elis, you don't want my help. I love physics but I am perpetually confused by it.

the thing that's really frustrating me at this point is that the bits of physics that I not only understand but use regularly without trouble -- stokes, gauss, green, maxwell, euler, surface integrals, line integrals, what have you -- make no sense whatsoever to me in a pure math context. I can't tell if it's because the people who write math textbooks don't understand physics, or because I don't understand the mathematical principles underlying physics. either way it's making me bonkers.

in between errands and obligations today I pretended to read my math textbook, but all I really accomplished was to make a lot of my fingers bleed. profusely. sometimes I amaze myself in all the wrong ways. 7:53 PM

•••    bitter cold. headache. sunlight too bright, too grey. it feels like the week after christmas, when the excitement is all over and you know you should be happy but you're just not for some reason. you're too tired from trying to balance niceness with greediness, the shiny things have lost their lustre, and you feel obligated to eat the leftovers that just serve to remind you that your life has become a collection of remnants from special occasions. but you're busy pretending to be cheerful because you don't want anyone to know how much you're lacking in the holiday spirit department.

it's not the week after christmas. in fact if not for the houses decorated with lights and wreaths and plastic reindeer, the only christmassy thing around here would be the absurd amounts of pine that seem to have taken over the dining hall. in some ways I like the way college and finals has kept me from getting blindsided by holiday commercialism and propaganda and anticipation; it's nice to go home and have it just be christmas without all the anxious hustlebustle that comes beforehand. on the other hand, I miss the ritual preparation parts that I think were more important to my childhood than the actual holiday ever was: making ornaments, painting and baking and list-editing, picking out the tree and decorating it, rediscovering all the memories that have been packed in newspapers and cardboard for eleven months, listening to the grinch and amahl, all the other things that simply can't be crammed into a single weekend.

armless marble ben franklin is watching me from his perch next to the lexis-nexis documents. more austere coldness. lips pursed, brow furrowed. he looks mildly disappointed in me.

what the hell am I talking about? quantify my luck... 12:18 PM

•••    I would just like to register a general sense of unsubstantiated ugh with the world today.

ugh because I feel at odds with it, or maybe myself. unsubstantiated because there's no good reason for me to feel anything of the sort. I guess two weeks of uninterrupted contentment is really more than I deserved.

in the mirror this morning my eyes looked strangely pale and faraway, as if I were looking at myself through a glacier. now my vision is laced with criss-crossing afterimages of the windowpane shadows on my wall, red on green on orange on blue. 10:45 AM

•••    it is very late and I have officially reached the point where I should be spending all of my waking hours studying math.

but. I'm not. some of you have asked to see this infamous psychology paper, and since it gives me an excuse to brush the dust off my other, older, website, I decided to post it. footnotes and references and all. (note to plagiarists: it's not that good. go away. or don't, and may your insides be disintigrated by guilt.)

it's about suicide. and yeah, I picked the topic. let me tell you, I got some funny looks from people who saw me carrying around a giant book entitled "essential papers on suicide." best popular science title ever, by the way: malignant sadness. what a beautiful little two-word phrase. it was also the best part of the book, but that's not too much of a criticism. anyway. it's about why suicide is still a common human behavior even though natural selection supposedly gets rid of traits that are detrimental to our existence. even if you agree with nothing else, you have to admit that suicide is pretty detrimental. it's mostly a (biased, because everything in the world is biased no matter what we pretend) review of theories (I cringe typing that, but psychologists treat the word "theory" differently than physicists and biologists) put forth by other people.

it's hard to write a paper about suicide. I can't imagine studying depression or anything like that for any extended period of time; I'd work myself into some sort of hyper-introspective paralysis. even from a detached perspective, viewing the whole of the human species without any distracting personal details, it's draining. on the other hand, it's really interesting, and you can't tell me it's not relevant (unless you don't believe in evolution, I guess). if your life hasn't been affected by suicide... I don't know, I can't even fathom that.

anyway. I think that's fair warning. here it is. 3:23 AM

tuesday, december 12

•••    today has been exciting. it was the last day of classes, but my only class was the one I had to teach, so it didn't feel much like school. (by the way, it is much much harder to teach three physicists than it is to teach twenty five fourth graders. I can't believe I'm going to be doing this for money someday.)

before that, though, the wind knocked down a bunch of tree branches and power lines. I finished my wormhole notes in the silent stormy dark, and I walked to school amidst a flurry of plant parts. I watched, transfixed, as the uppermost branch of a tree broke off and plunged in apparent slow motion to the ground, where it crashed into the sidewalk and broke into hundreds of pieces that went spinning off into the street.

after astro and the wormholes I spent the afternoon with one of my classmates, working on our final lab. we got to print out our pictures of the planets on the good color laser printer, and they're all glossy and bright and beautiful. it's silly how enchanted I am with my fuzzy groundscope pictures of the same planets I've been seeing for years in satellite pictures, but in my kind of astronomy we really don't do much visual observing, and I'm impressed with myself for producing something that's an actual picture instead of just a spiky graph.

maybe it's because it was the last day of classes; maybe it's because I barely slept last night; maybe it's because we're both silly and we feed off each other like speaker noise through a microphone; probably it was a combination of all three. in any case, we ended up turning in not a lab report but a field report, full of reconnaissance photos, in-jokes, bad puns, and terrible grammar. io was anthropomorphized. saturn was green. we couldn't sell our modern art for money. homer simpson fell down the wormhole. mmm, looks expensive. oh, it was funny. sometimes you just have to give in to your ridiculous impulses. hopefully our professor will be at least a little amused.

with less than two hours before my deadline, I turned my attention to my psychology paper. as is usually the case with my un-outlined, all-in-one-sitting papers, it was a wordy wordy mess full of three-line sentences and badly abused commas. still, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my content was better than I thought. I gave it a quick purple-pen onceover, inserted some commas and despliced some sentences, cut-and-pasted bits of paragraphs, printed it out and paperclipped the whole eighteen-page stack together. it was more like a chempeel than the facelift it would have gotten in an ideal world, but even the little things matter when you're editing appearances.

I started a list on my whiteboard.

rabi is finished with:

• wormhole presentation
• astro lab
• evopsycho paper

and it's only going to grow. whee. 8:32 PM

•••    I just looked up from what my overhead-marker-rendering of quantum foam to see dark, heavy clouds racing across the pale pre-sunrise sky, behind a curtain of pine needles and dead leaves that seem to have become trapped in a miniature hurricane outside my window. the bare treetops are shaking and shuddering in the wind, and even the telephone poles are swaying back and forth.

it all looks very odd in juxtaposition with the christmas-lit houses; candles in windows, wreaths on doors, lights on trees, and a storm brewing overhead.

and wormholes on my desk. 6:53 AM

•••    dear rabi,
you always have to make things more complicated than necessary, don't you? you could have done a simple presentation on something people actually understand, like spiral arm structure or stellar evolution or something, but noooo, you have to do something thoroughly incomprehensible like wormholes and hyperspace. isn't school hard enough as it is?
love, the universe

dear universe,
it's cool and you know it. neener neener. :P
love, rabi 5:20 AM

monday, december 11

•••    in approximately thirteen hours I will be teaching people about wormholes. I haven't even finished reading all the material yet.

my eating habits are all mucked up. cream of wheat, orange juice, peanuts, and bagels for dinner. I need vegetables.

also, wobblyjockey? 8:52 PM

•••    in physics we made things levitate. we had a top spinning five inches above the tabletop, and I passed my hands under and over and around it and still it floated, wobbling a little from the disruption of local air currents but righting itself through sheer force of will (actually angular momentum, but that doesn't sound so impressive). and then I made a stack of neodynium magnets hover end-to-end above a high temperature superconductor. it was hard; if one got a little off balance they would all fall suddenly and unceremoniously into the tray of liquid nitrogen. the chopsticks I was using to maneuver them got so cold that when I lifted them out of the tray, little snowflakes cascaded off their pointed ends and I was surrounded in a cloud of swirling frozen fog.

today I am a superhero. 1:02 PM

•••    there's something vaguely ironic about the relationship between soy and cholesterol: if you have high cholesterol, eating soy protein will help lower it. if you eat soy, though, your eating habits are probably such that you don't have much trouble with cholesterol to begin with. ah well. we still have isoflavins. 8:54 AM

sunday, december 10

•••    yesterday I was informed by an iraqi cab driver that the main problem with technology is that it makes us fight wars with atom bombs instead of swords. this proclamation was accompanied by some very flourishy pantomime, which was almost but not quite enough to convince me that I am wrong in my longstanding conviction that the only redeeming quality of mass destruction by explosion is the interesting aesthetics of mushroom clouds and rubble, especially at sunset.

and then today in the stairwell at thirtieth street station, there was a homeless man sitting on the railing, with a cup out for quarters -- just quarters. he also had a big fold-out map of the united states with slots for all the state quarters. it's not every day you see a numismatist who sleeps on the street.

so this has been a pretty amazing weekend full of all kinds of wish fulfillment and strangely beautiful things. and now the people across the street have decorated their trees in little white lights, and sitting here in my pajamas and striped socks, I am having one of my rare moments where I think I don't mind suburbia so much after all.

as for the shoelace tips, ever since the beginning of my obsession with genetics in high school, I have called them telomeres. I do not, however, refer to shoelaces as chromosomes.

titles in links require just a little extra effort on the part of the reader, the same way footnotes in text do. that's what makes them worthwhile.

wockerjabby, reader's digest version. yup. 9:01 PM