ox

12-15 日, 12-16 月

He's studying algebraic geometry said in the same half-awed, half-sneering tone as something like he's homesteading in the Alaskan interior.

Some minor overnight rainfall stained the pavement. Leaves were scattered over the ground, each ochre and about as big as a thumbnail. They seemed to have become laminated into the concrete, and their pigment leeched out in a soft, brick-red corona.

I made pancakes today. I saw a book on mountaineering in the Little Free Library outside the Methodist church.

12-14 土

Overheard while walking out of the exam room: Hey, how was it? Man, I'm going to kill myself.

Last year there was a student who walked out mid-exam and never returned. They had to call police; there was a whole manhunt at 10pm. Much later the student confessed to the proctoring teacher: I just didn't want to come back.

12-13 金

I just don't want to do evil things. That's difficult. Then we all laughed about my Russian MP3 player.

12-12 木

In our probability model there is no difference between flipping a coin infinitely many times versus God reaching into his bucket of infinite sequences of ones and zeroes and drawing a particular sequence. We all smile despite ourselves; it just sounds funny. He smiles at our smiling but immediately tenses up. I'm sorry, I didn't mean that in a sacrilegous way... Whether he is making a concession to the Christians or Bayesians in the room, it is unclear.

12-11 水

Sonya and I were discussing how being a good artist is very useful in math. A strong spatial awareness comes in handy just about anywhere, from taking line integrals to looking at 2D nets of 3D solids, to knot theory, even in abstract algebra I associate a lot of concepts very strongly & vividly with certain visualizations. Terence Tao has this hilarious anecdote literally about rotating shapes in his mind; the STEMcel shape rotator meme has never been more applicable.

For example, taking a quotient space in linear algebra feels to me a lot like origami and though this is very silly it reminds me of mille-feuille or pastry layers. Taking the quotient of a topological space is a lot like pinching the space. A PhD student in algebraic topology recently remarked that the class would be easier if she were able to imagine these strange homotopies in greater clarity. But math can get weird quick enough to surpass your mind's eye. An easy example is trying to envision anything higher than three dimensions. And, if anyone has found a way to visualize sheaves, please let me know.

12-10 火

Now I'm reading Some Prefer Nettles from Tanizaki, but mainly filling my brain with Substack paragraphs in-between intervals of exam-review. A week ago I laid in bed staring at the ceiling. A cold and childish dread shifted inside of me; it felt like a metal probe at the back of my throat; I felt so desolate. I've been thinking about how the Russian word пустиня can mean wilderness, desert, or emptiness. I have to keep reminding myself I don't actually want to die.

S sent me photos of a stray cat that had miraculously decided to sit on his lap. Its eyes were closed and it was smiling like the Buddha.

Every time I see strays I do just about everything but pull out the calipers. Let me explain: the cats where I lived were mainly Arabian Maus, or some variant. Huge ears, Marfan-esque faces, & cursorial bodies; you know, built for desert life.

The strays in China, on the other hand (or at least, strays on S's university campus) are all soft edges. They have blunted ears and stubby paws. They look like stuffed animals that have seen a lifetime of love.

(That's what I meant by the calipers.)

12-06 金

Accepted both of the teaching jobs.

Russian final seemingly went well. The prof said of my homework assignments: Imya writes fun stuff; she makes me laugh and it almost made the semester worth it. I'll be sad to not see her (and some classmates) around anymore, but my patience is running pretty short with language classes and I'm done with fulfilling my foreign language credits. It was a nice GPA-booster while it lasted.

Been talking to K more recently and even called him one night (twelve-hour time difference). Maybe one of the best things I decided to do this year was to get in touch with him. Only took me ~11 months.

Listening to so much Bill Calahan/Smog lately. I have the same birthday as him. For a while you couldn't tell if he was fourteen or forty years old—he looks and acts like he was taken out of another time—but he has this incredible baritone.

I've been listening to this strain of misanthropic indie folk/rock ever since I was like fifteen, back in the Middle East I would envision the smudged lives of these (relatively) obscure singers who mostly came from sunny Southern California or canny New York or green, green Virginia—yet in my mind I only ever saw them traveling through endless fields of beheaded corn in some sepia and unmistakably American heartland, flinty-faced frontiersmen dragged unwilling into the present with guitars in hand.

I was obsessed with this image the same way some teens worshipped British rock and post-punk, or K-pop, or Taylor Swift, or Japanese experiments in sound. And I think I'm still somehow caught up in this mythos, even though it's never been easier for me to get to live performances in order to break this spell, standing awkwardly around a bunch of morose white people no less than a decade older than me.

Ivy was right; the Sangaria meluné is less sweet & definitely has a bitterness to it, however slight, when compared to its Shirakiku compatriot.

12-05 木

Last midterm of the semester. I had seven (!) midterms in one semester (not counting my Russian class nor my finals; if I did, this would've been around thirteen tests, an average rate of about four tests per month) and I did well on exactly zero out of the seven. Which is honestly kind of impressive.

Accepted one of the part-time teaching assistant jobs even though I have no idea what I'm doing.

I found this neat overlap between an excerpt from Woman in the Dunes and a podcast:

In reality, no one is actually average

—Well, listen to me calmly. Acrophobes, heroin addicts, hysterics, homicidal maniacs, syphilitics, morons—suppose there were one per cent of each of these, the total would be twenty percent. If you could enumerate eighty more abnormalities at this rate—and of course you could—there would be statistical proof that humanity is a hundred per cent abnormal.

What a relief!