in which california weather takes its usual winter turn
I had my first real Christmas Weekend ever, this year. we (my parents and I, sister being in ny) drove up to see people who except for the fact of not being related to us by blood are exactly like family, down to the fact that we don't actually talk to them that often and I had to keep whispering to my dad to check on who, exactly, was who. but it was wonderful. there was christmas dinner, with turkey and ham and stuffing and sweet potatoes and a jello mold (!); to drink, it was beer or wine or milk and then coffee for afters, with pie. all somehow incredibly all-american (read, also, not jewish) and in many ways unlike anything I had ever experienced. we talked and played cards, and then the next morning went over again to hear stories about my grandma and her "high school set," and being in the service and going to UCs, so many lives with so many tragedies, too. it was fascinating.
and then back down with a stop at carpinteria to see more family friends, adding up to more sugar and caffeine and then some sushi. then, home, to walk around santa monica for a few hours and catch up even more.
(note: we have mice, and the dog has been chasing them all night. now she closed in to sleep and I am in the kitchen, and I just heard some weird noises behind me and saw TWO mice run across the floor. it's really creepy, but now I know for sure that she wasn't hallucinating all night.)
I worked all week and then went away for the weekend and then worked today (1-9), so there has been very little breathing room. there still won't be in the next few weeks, and I guess I understand now how the semester went so fast, because when you're doing something nearly every minute a sort of compression seems to occur. I'm pretty sure it's for the best (even though I have yet to go to the gym or to email people about internships, let alone dwell more on my classes for next semester. and these are superficial things compared to what I suspect I should truly be confronting, all those niggling little thoughts about people and happiness and life goals. sometimes it seems like my mind is constantly running away from itself.)
at least work was quiet today, so I got to read all of the opus cartoons (and was told by a customer that he could never understand comics, it was always - in his opinion - the left-brainers who were into those sorts of things. they also, he added, liked science fiction. this is not my favorite type of customer, but they do exist). I also started, and bought, "A Compact History of Infinity," which I am enjoying with the guilty sense that I should just go take Real Analysis (and all of its prerequisites) and not be the kind of person who reads popular science writing. Particularly when that writing is done by david foster wallace, author of a tome of fiction and some other stuff too, but certainly not the foremost expert in number theory (or epistemology, or analysis, or history, or any of the fields that he tries to give their full due). maybe I don't need to go take more classes; I know a lot of it already, from philosophy and calc and discrete, but it's interesting to see it all laid out with the concept of infinity as its center.
enough.
*
a little something from wodehouse:
"In these days in which we live, when existence has become a thing of infinite complexity and fate, if it slips us a bit of goose with one hand, is pretty sure to give us the sleeve across the windpipe with the other, it is rarely that we find a human being who is unmixedly happy. Always the bitter will be blended with the sweet, and in this melange one can be reasonably certain that it is the former that will predominate.
A severe indictment of our modern civilization, but it can't say it didn't ask for it."
and then back down with a stop at carpinteria to see more family friends, adding up to more sugar and caffeine and then some sushi. then, home, to walk around santa monica for a few hours and catch up even more.
(note: we have mice, and the dog has been chasing them all night. now she closed in to sleep and I am in the kitchen, and I just heard some weird noises behind me and saw TWO mice run across the floor. it's really creepy, but now I know for sure that she wasn't hallucinating all night.)
I worked all week and then went away for the weekend and then worked today (1-9), so there has been very little breathing room. there still won't be in the next few weeks, and I guess I understand now how the semester went so fast, because when you're doing something nearly every minute a sort of compression seems to occur. I'm pretty sure it's for the best (even though I have yet to go to the gym or to email people about internships, let alone dwell more on my classes for next semester. and these are superficial things compared to what I suspect I should truly be confronting, all those niggling little thoughts about people and happiness and life goals. sometimes it seems like my mind is constantly running away from itself.)
at least work was quiet today, so I got to read all of the opus cartoons (and was told by a customer that he could never understand comics, it was always - in his opinion - the left-brainers who were into those sorts of things. they also, he added, liked science fiction. this is not my favorite type of customer, but they do exist). I also started, and bought, "A Compact History of Infinity," which I am enjoying with the guilty sense that I should just go take Real Analysis (and all of its prerequisites) and not be the kind of person who reads popular science writing. Particularly when that writing is done by david foster wallace, author of a tome of fiction and some other stuff too, but certainly not the foremost expert in number theory (or epistemology, or analysis, or history, or any of the fields that he tries to give their full due). maybe I don't need to go take more classes; I know a lot of it already, from philosophy and calc and discrete, but it's interesting to see it all laid out with the concept of infinity as its center.
enough.
*
a little something from wodehouse:
"In these days in which we live, when existence has become a thing of infinite complexity and fate, if it slips us a bit of goose with one hand, is pretty sure to give us the sleeve across the windpipe with the other, it is rarely that we find a human being who is unmixedly happy. Always the bitter will be blended with the sweet, and in this melange one can be reasonably certain that it is the former that will predominate.
A severe indictment of our modern civilization, but it can't say it didn't ask for it."