Thingses.
Stuffs what has struck me as worth writing down:
- At work I now have an apron with my name stitched in pretty cursive across the front. I feel an odd, fluffy sense of belonging when I tie it on.
- Apparently... some infinities are bigger than others.
Like, you can have one set of numbers stretching to infinity that is somehow not the same size as another, quite different set of numbers that also stretches to infinity.
This makes no sense to a Duckie, not least because the whole concept of "infinity" strikes me as ridiculous and incomprehensible. But those curious devices which universities manufacture for turning coffee into theorems - mathematicians - have known about this for some time, and claim to be able to prove it definitively. With little Greek letters and everything.
(Mind blown courtesy of Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh.)
- There are some places to which I am obliged to go, and out of which I know I will stumble with a strong headache and a nagging desire to burn things.
I live in south Louisiana. It's statistically likely that some of my relatives will be jingoistic, creationist, homophobic birthers who think that socialized medicine is tyranny but police misconduct is acceptable because it keeps "people like that" from murdering us in our beds.
Oh, the things I wish I could say. Things like:
"Historians are not cheerleaders; most of them don't have the legs for those little skirts. They are not 'hating America' when they note that George Washington owned slaves and Andrew Jackson did amazingly shitty things to Native Americans. These are facts - that is to say, 'truths known by evidence and observation,' with which you might be more familiar if you didn't devote your free time to people like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh."
"The Patriot Act, expensive undeclared wars of aggression, the establishment of Orwellian prisons where 'detainees' are tortured, and John Yoo's morally repugnant legalese about executive authority were all fine by you - rah, rah, red, white, and blue! - until the moment a Democrat moved into the Oval Office. Now you're concerned about limiting government power? It's rude to wipe your ass with the Constitution and then wave it in my face."
"You home-schooled your daughter to believe this planet is 6,000 years old and the theory of evolution is a vicious lie perpetrated by atheists. You can shut the fuck up about the quality of education in public schools."
But you're not allowed to say those things to your sweet-voiced, matronly, churchgoing aunts. Not if you ever want to show your face at Grandma's house again.
- "Listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door," said e e cummings. "Let's go."