On the road again

I'm en route back to Santa Fe - right now sitting in the Houston airport waiting to head off to Albuquerque. I originally was ticketed for a flight that would just now be boarding in San Antonio; instead a very helpful Continental employee cheerfully got me a seat on an earlier flight to Houston and then a more timely connection through to Albuquerque. I've had good experiences with Continental's customer service in the past, but I'm pretty sure being in my spiffy dress uniform helped.

I cannot begin to express how happy I am to be:
1) On leave. For the two weeks I can go to bed whenever I want, get up whenever I want, eat whenever and wherever I want, and don't need to answer to a single NCO. The last day I had like that, free of any sort of obligation to the Army, was January 30.
2) Out of San Antonio. Current weather in San Antonio: 105º, "feels like" 108º and according to weather.com is so hot that outdoor activity should be avoided. This is unremarkable weather there; it was the same weather, for example, for our two-week field exercise. Current weather in Santa Fe: 83º, "feels like" 81º, temperatures gently falling to 57º this evening. Most places in the industrialized world have more pleasant weather than San Antonio.
3) Away from Ft. Sam Houston. There's a good chance in my career that I'll end up back there for further training. But for sixteen weeks one of the strictest training companies there. A few hours each weekend off post (assuming you want to pay for the cab ride) is not sufficient.
4) An adult again. Things I can now do now that Army training no longer owns me: go places on my own without a "battle buddy". Stay out past 8:30 PM on a weeknight or 10:00 on a weekend. Skip breakfast if I so desire. Skip lunch if I so desire. Drive. Sleep in past 6:30 on a weekend. Carry my cell phone on me during the day. Carry a book on me during the day. Walk around in civilian clothes without a bit of paper on my person indicating that I have permission to do so. Wear tank tops with nothing over them, with my shoulders and armpits exposed for the world to see.
5) On my way to see mountains. Northern New Mexico spoils you and you truly don't realize how lucky you are to be there - until you're not. There's nowhere in the world like it: the way the mountains just glow around sunset, the smell of chiles roasting in August, the sudden downpours of monsoon season, the art and food and bustle of tourists and thrum of day-to-day life all blending together with the incredible natural beauty everywhere you look. Then after a few days in the Land of Enchantment I'm off back to my original home in New Jersey, where there's good pizza and perhaps a trip down the shore, definitely a trip to one of Philadelphia's museums, and most importantly, the comforting familiarity of the house where I grew up, my parents, their delightfully goofy dog.
6) On the cusp of another adventure. I'll be spending the next 24 months stationed in Germany, which means I get to live in Europe! For two years! With a steady, decent paycheck! There'll be lots of trips to Fun Places in Europe (first up: London, of course), good German beer, a fantastic opportunity to learn a fascinating language, and hopefully two years of learning more about medicine.

Life, right now, is *good*.

Thoughts on my history of math and science.

So I'm graduating on Saturday. St. John's being St. John's we don't have finals and it feels much more like we're just kind of gliding to a halt than anything else. They've given us, as they do, copies of our original admissions essays for our consideration.

I'm finished with my tutorials, which is interesting because it means that, unless I go back to school - which I hope to, though I'm not quite sure in what - I'm done with formal study of, well, everything, but especially math and science. I've taken four years of math and three of science past high school.

When I was in high school, first looking at colleges, I wasn't sure what I wanted to study (I'm still not, for what it's worth). Journalism was a possibility, as were English, poli sci, international relations. In any of the programs I was looking at, at any of the schools, I would have needed maybe a semester or two of economics or statistics, sociology or psychology. I would not need geometry, algebra, calculus, physics, chemistry, biology - none of that.

Then I found St. John's, and while I was hesitant at first I couldn't shake my interest. It looked like there would be no way I could avoid a challenge, which was appealing, and it looked absolutely nothing like high school. That really appealed to me. In high school we sat at individual desks with text books and listened to the teacher talk from the front of the room. At St. John's there were no desks and, really, no discernible front of the room, and the first class I sat in on, a Greek class at Annapolis, the teacher sat at the table along with all the students, they addressed each other as equals - and the only people to write anything on the board were students. This was someplace that was not about furthering professor's careers or producing the best statistics or training students to do something in the future. This was a place that was about learning, all sorts of things, solely for the sake of learning. Study was the end, not the means, and if what you studied didn't land you a dream job right after graduating, that didn't matter, because that wasn't the point.

So I ended up here, and it didn't work out too well at first, because I hadn't figured out the above. I knew St. John's appealed to me, more than other schools, but I hadn't figured out why, because I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. Two of the most important events of my academic career happened between May 2005 and December 2005: I interned at a newspaper (and realized I didn't want to work in journalism), and I got kicked out of school. It's not quite technically true but practically speaking, I flunked out.

So I went, and ended up in London - which was fantastic - and I did lots and lots of thinking about why I liked St. John's, and what I wanted to do with my life. And then I came back, and it wasn't really smooth sailing, but it was smoother, and eventually I found my footing again.

What have I gotten from St. John's?

Well, there's the numbers. Four years of my life. A huge amount of debt. Too many books.

I've gotten a grounding in evolution and genetics, general and special relativity, quantum physics, electricity, mechanics, ancient Greek, literature, philosophy, French, music, chemistry, theology, and anatomy. Will I ever use any of that? Maybe. Will I use the skills I learned along the way? Definitely.

I think, ultimately, the most that I've gotten out of the whole experience is doing it. I've studied Einstein. I've spent three hours on a Saturday trying to get a science experiment to work. I've slogged through ridiculous Greek verb conjugations. I've sat and had serious discussions about the Bible, about Dante, and about philosophy texts that need to be broken down word-by-word to be understood.

Honestly I don't know what that adds up to. I know it adds up to something, some significant change. Maybe I would have gotten it at any other school but I doubt it; I certainly wouldn't have studied Gregorian chant and quantum mechanics elsewhere. I was scared of a lot of what I studied, but I studied it, and usually I learned it, and there's something to be said for that.

My thoughts on senior math, condensed

Dearest Lobachevsky,

BITE ME.

Sincerely,

A Student

On writing and stress

We're now in the tail-end of our class-free writing period (class-free being that we don't meet for seminar or tutorials, not that we're becoming white trash). Papers are due on the 14th.

On Tuesday I met with my adviser to go over a draft, a meeting in which we said, "Yes, this sucks. Good. Now what do you want to write?" "Well, I think that actually I'm trying to write about how the Constitution is a social contract; I had to talk about freedom at first to get my brain there." "Good. Go write it."

So I did. I did a bit of work on Tuesday, and then pretty much sat down yesterday and said, "I am going to write this." And I did. And it turned out the paper I want to write isn't too similar to what I actually already wrote, so it wasn't so much 'copy/paste/rearrange' but just 'write'. I'd told my adviser I would email it to him Thursday morning, which is today. So I sat and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, and I thought and thought and thought and then wrote more. 21 pages, almost all new, in about the space of 24 hours.

Now I have emailed that off, and now I'm sitting here like, 'huh. no writing to be done. odd.'

I can't imagine how I'm going to feel not just once I've turned in the paper (my guess, though, is relieved and very drunk), but once I finish my oral and am truly and honestly done with this paper. It occupies such a huge part of my mind I'm having a hard time imagining not having it to work on.

Since yesterday

Faust is undeniably awesome, if only because Faust himself is such a Johnny and Goethe agrees that poodles are inherently satanic. It's such a delightfully bizarre story, and apparently part II, which we don't read, is even weirder. That gets added to my list of "books I want to read but I'm not going to have time to touch until after I graduate". Speaking of time:

Yesterday I got my lab homework done between class, work, and seminar. Went to seminar. Came home from seminar. Spent about an hour and a half translating French. Started my math reading, gave up around 1 and went to bed. Got up, went to lab at 9, went to work at 10:30. Am now finishing math reading and eating lunch. French at 1:30, then math at 3. Then pickup my paycheck and take a sweet, sweet nap.

Note to self: that mostly-empty Thursday with 3 classes on Friday is going to take some time-management skills.

Senior year ahoy

I have lab this morning (Faraday! Electricity! The answers are within sight!) and math this afternoon (Einstein! Holy crap, Einstein!). Meeting with a tutor on Thursday to bounce senior essay ideas off of him.

I'm not wholly convinced it seems like it's been five years since I was sitting in a dorm room in uppers, trying to figure out how to read Homer and what puzzling over what exactly it meant to "prepare" Euclid's first definitions. It's got to be either a lot less or a lot more.

Here we go.

Save Mr. Rogers

PBS is intending to take Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood out of regular rotation, limiting it to one episode a week, on weekends.

I dare you to watch this and not feel just...cheated by this decision.


Or how about this one?


Or this?


Fred Rogers was probably one of, if not the most sincere, honest, loving man in television. He absolutely, truly believed in the sanctity of childhood, that absolutely every child was worthwhile and wonderful. He taught children that it was okay to feel however you felt, and that sometimes even your very own emotions are scary, but that's okay. He taught that there was a time and place for make-believe, but that the real world was just as interesting. He said over and over that there is someone who loves you and you are worthy of that love.

Mr. Rogers never talked down to children but also didn't treat them as miniature adults. He treated them with respect as people and tried to give the comfort and nurturing that children need. He didn't preach, or lecture, but engaged in dialogue through the TV, reaching out to kids in the most genuine way possible.

I remember being home sick from school one day in high school, maybe ninth or tenth grade. Both my parents were at work and I was alone in the house. I was lying on the futon downstairs and turned on the TV, and there was Mr. Rogers. He was just the same as he'd been when I was ten years younger - and he was every bit as comforting to watch.

To deprive a generation of children of that is just mean. In this world, we could all benefit from someone who was regularly there, every day, to say he likes you just the way you are, and things may be scary but it's okay to be scared. Children may need that more than ever right now. Why would we possibly want to take that away?

Success!

I have now baked something entirely on my own, wholly without supervision, and completely without problem.

Granted, it was cookies from one of those refrigerated rolls of pre-made dough, so all I really needed to do was set the oven to the right temperature, gob the dough onto the pan, put it in the oven, and take it out ten minutes later.  But still: my first unsupervised baking adventure.

To balance the sense of culinary maturity, dinner is ramen and a pack of chips from the vending machine.  

Aaaaah

It's amazing how you could be in the foulest, grumpiest, nastiest mood ever...then you go and exercise in some way, and you're suddenly full of happy.  Bonus points for riding a bike along a moderately busy road and skimming on past all the traffic.

Best drug in the world.

One down

I had my oral today.  I think it went pretty well.  I'm glad to have it over with but I'm glad I didn't have it right after turning in my paper; I needed some more time to let the ideas really properly gel in my mind.  

Left to do: Language paper, math paper, lab paper, figure out a way to make myself sound somewhat vaguely close to intelligent and worthwhile in my junior conference.  

I'm so glad I'm just working in the library again this summer, because I could not deal with finding a job right now.

Seminar, I love you.

I felt overwhelmingly 'meh' about seminar for most of this semester.  Why?  Kant, mostly.  Kant and I are not friends.  I don't understand Kant and quite honestly, I'm okay with that.  I'm pretty sure that if I did understand him I wouldn't like him any more.  So seminar and I have been kind of drifting apart this semester.

Now I want to buy seminar flowers and chocolates and take it out to dinner and stuff.  (Note: not my actual seminar as in the people in it.)  Why?  A couple reasons:

1.  The Scarlet Letter is an amazing, incredible book.  I got a hint of it with Shakespeare last year, but I'd still been waiting to revisit something we read in high school and have it be a different book.  That very much didn't happen with Austen (she's still boring).  Rereading Hawthorne, then discussing it, then reading it again and discussing it again was like intellectual heroin or something.  Holy crap: how did I possibly hate this book in high school?  (I know; I hated everything.)

2.  Adam Smith.  It's dry, and I'd never read economics if I were left to my own devices.  But I'm so glad I read it - he's not at all what I thought he was.

3.  And now we start the serious joy.  For Thursday, we read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and start the Federalist Papers.  I'm very very very excited about this.  There is no possible way seminar will be anything but awesome, because those are some of the most amazing documents ever penned.

4.  To round the year out, our last two seminars are on Huckleberry Finn.  If I'm not already filled with warm fuzzies from the Federalist papers, a good dose of Mark Twain will pick me up.  

Hell, I'm even feeling good about math right now.

Yeah, about that...

7:45 PM on Sunday night isn't that bad of a time to finish my seminar essay, right?  For values of 'finish' that mean 'still need to edit and probably rewrite a crapload because I'm a freaking idiot of epic proportions'?  

Excuse me while I go sob in a corner for a bit.  If you happen to see one Mr. Jean-Jacques Rousseau around, please kick him in the head with steel-toed boots for me, okay?

I dreamt a dream...

Last night I had - for once - a nice, not-insanely-weird dream that I remembered. Well, it was a little weird, but not 'angry Plato turns into a snail' weird.

I was in London, and I was in a supermarket. I bought some of the few things I needed - bread, eggs, pasta - and walked home. Then I went back out, and sat in a little cafe or coffee shop along a busy road, and watched London go by.

Then my alarm clock went off and I got up and went to math class. It was cold and there was still snow on the ground.

Guess which I'd rather, reality or that dream? (Hint: I'm not a citizen of the place that feels like home.)

A list of things on my mind.

1. It's snowing in Santa Fe. As in, right now, snow is falling from the sky. That is so inappropriate.

2. We're reading more Kant for the next three seminars, and I think that my motivation is at an all-time low for seminar.

3. Seminar essays are due a week from next Monday. I'm going to write on Rousseau. My motivation is at a medium-high level, because it gives me something non-Kantian to cling to.

4. I've come to the realization that, while I have an idea of what I'd like to do with my life, I have exactly no idea how to get there. I've worked myself into a ridiculous hole of student debt for a useless degree, and now I need to figure out how to climb out.

4a. Do I regret going to St. John's? No, not really. I believe in education as an end in and of itself, not a means to an end. And I've enjoyed it, and I feel accomplished. Would it have been easier to go someplace else? Uh, yes. Would it have been worth it? I don't know.

4b. If I had to make the college decision over again, but knowing what I do now, would I have gone to St. John's? No. My first choice would've been to put more effort into it and go someplace in the UK. My second choice probably would have been the same, Earlham, where I could've, you know, majored in something.

5. I don't feel like going to work tonight. What I really want to do is curl up in a chair with a cup of hot chocolate and a good book that's not Kant or Flaubert, and just read the night away. Alas, reality has other plans.

Break time

I am now finished classes for two full weeks.  

I haven't even started packing, yet I feel incredibly relaxed right now, because I don't have lab this afternoon and I don't have four classes worth of homework to do this weekend.  This semester has been really wearing me down, but we're now halfway through, and I think I can get through it with sanity intact.  

Argh.

I finally broke down and saw the nurse, thus ending my many-year streak of not needing to consult a medical professional for illnesses.  I haven't had any sort of illness that lingers for more than a day or three in a long time, which was a record I wanted to keep.

Verdict: It's probably a cold, probably not a sinus infection, and may or may not turn into a sinus infection and/or bronchitis.  

I really really hate being sick, especially when I swallow my pride, see a doctor (well, nurse in this case), only to be told that we can't do anything about it.  

*grump*

Whoa

Lately I've been having a bit of difficulty sleeping, especially after I twisted my sleep schedule around a bit while working on a big essay a while ago. Tired of waking up not at all rested, I picked up some melatonin at the store the other day. I'm not comfortable with most typical sleep aids for a variety of reasons, but some research showed melatonin to be cheap, not likely at all to leave me groggy, no problems taking it as frequently or infrequently as needed, and generally safe. The only real side effect I read about was vivid dreams and/or nightmare, which was fairly negligible.

They are very much not joking about that. Oh man are they not joking. I fell asleep in no time at all, which was great, but then last night was the first night in years that I actually woke up from a nightmare and then had trouble calming my brain down. It was incredibly weird, the type of nightmare that was absolutely and completely nonsensical, but it was so vivid I had a rather hard time convincing myself of that. I'm working on writing it up, because it's too damn weird to just let go, but as a preview: I was on a quest for...the secret, hidden laundry room, which apparently was someplace behind a hidden door near the disused pool. The quest got delayed because of the mummified remains sealed in the glass-encased portable sauna machine. Then things started to get weird.

I'm not going to write melatonin off entirely because of that (I did sleep well up until that), but if/when I take it again, no more movies about serial killers before bed. (Memories of Murder, btw, a Korean thriller. Very good.)

School. Thinking. Things.

1. I still really like Hobbes, as he fascinates me. I'm also in awe of how quickly Leviathan changes from 'interesting and fairly unique discussion on the nature of man' to 'completely insane political theories'. Seriously: the sovereign can do no wrong? Man cannot justly accuse the sovereign of wrong? Totalitarianism is the best idea? Revolution is (generally) unjust? Man. That's some seriously out-there stuff - but at the same time, his influence on the establishment of modern political theory is absolutely obvious.

2. Calculus. It's interesting, because I feel bits of high school math trickling back. Only this time...my gosh, I think I understand it! It's still hard, of course, but I get it. I can tell you what a derivative is, rather than just plunking away at a formula /calculator to find it. That makes it infinitely more enjoyable.

3. I had a dream last night that I was a police officer in Philadelphia. That was a bit strange, to say the least.

*twitch*

Want to see how long ten minutes can feel like?

Just have your 3:00, last-thing-on-Friday, I'm-so-tired-right-now lab class go ten minutes past the end time.

Bonus points for having it as an annoyingly interesting discussion, causing your brain to twitch spasmodically between "Oh god SHUT UP" and "Oh, hey that's really quite clarifying."

Work until 7:30 tonight and then I can go and sleep for eighty bajillion hours.

I smell phantom patchouli

Something about riding my bike to take the bus to Trader Joe's and getting a raffle ticket because I brought my own bag* makes me feel like an incredible hippie. Which, some would argue, I am, but I'm much more of the "conservative politics bad, personal hygiene good" type than the word tends to bring to mind.

I kind of wish that my parent's generation hadn't so sullied the image of the liberal.

*I didn't really mean to, but I realized as I was in line that I had my messenger bag with me (because I need something to carry my keys/bottle of water/phone/book in, and a bag like that's easier to manage on a bicycle), my purchases would all fit in it, so why in god's name should I carry both a shopping bag and that?