A digression from a few Mondays ago

Preface: I was under pressure to do several sets when this was written and now feel much better. :) and am publishing this as it's another post and for attendant points ;)


There's a lot of things I don't know, and that is never more obvious than when someone explains something by physics. It's a little discouraging, at first, to think that you have never noticed -- never cared -- about the simplest things that surround you.

It's interesting. I don't want this, my first post in a while, to be so vague and insecure and uncongealed. But right now I don't want to explain the coolest bit of physics that I've learned in a while. I will, of course. In a while.

I can't let go of this right now. I sat down to finish a few blog posts (that will not happen, due to a variety of reasons, social foremost among them) and got quite off the main road. That's kinda what has happened just recently. I guess this midterm season went not as well as I'd have liked. It didn't go badly, per se, but not well - and that's discouraging, to always be mediocre. Mediocrity at Caltech is not bad, but not exactly desirable either. I should work harder or care less - this middle ground is unfortunate.

I learned this term that I would willingly give up Astrophysics, not because I dislike it or have too much work -- that's not true at all -- I absolutely could do more work-- but because it doesn't come easy to me. Is that a cop-out?

I think it is.

Ignoring this very self-centered vein -- sorry -- I try pretty hard to widen my perspective, to work hard and play a lot, to wake up every morning knowing that my time was well spent the day before and that if I had died, disappeared in the night, even the time I wasted I enjoyed. So much time lost to my memory and lost even from there. But there are few regrets (one, actually, is not learning to play the cello; another, that I hadn't spent more time forgiving the faults of my grandparents).

It's not -- this whole widening perspective thing -- a constant in my thoughts, more a thoughtful constant that I believe (or wish I did) to the fullest of my ability and my reason. (Take the almost-Objectivism here with a grain of salt -- last year I downed all Rand's books only to discover I hated them. I hate her metaphors. I mean this - don't read them if you don't have to). There's not enough meaning in the world to gift it only to one life and one POV - your own -- that is the most limited, restrictive overview of life that I can imagine. Singularity? Uniqueness? Do these apply when there is so much to discover?

Yet there's a problem with knowing that not only is your life so stolidly average this conception of average and uniformity is beyond you. You -- ah, perhaps, only me -- but you see the dilemma there? It's not only me; so let me begin again. You in that giant, heaving mass of humanity -- you have to deal with the consequences of facing it. It, you ask? Facing the fact that you are nothing - that there is always someone more smart, more fun, more interesting and more charismatic and better in all things, even those you cannot imagine. And you feel overwhelmed. And you just...

Ah.