Attributed to Max Cho, on the challenge that “there are billions, no, trillions, of sentences spoken in English, but I can come up with one that has never been said before.”

“When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.” — Asimov’s Axiom

Anyone who has ever belonged to a group, or a club, or a forum, must see the appeal of such a congregation. Even if they have not attained it themselves. For right up there, right at the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, sits the hefty block labeled “belonging,” the most fundamental of the non-essential needs. It is merely rudimentary that to find and attach oneself to an in-group provides that very sense of belonging.

Over time, the in-group develops a shared culture, a kind of group personality. Alice says to Bob, blah-and-blah, and it’s all very much like a coded signal. Bob receives the signal and correctly interprets it. They think, we mutually understand each other; we’re all so close to each other! We understand each other! And they rejoice, and it’s all a big positive feedback loop.

But one can’t be close to everyone else in the world. The very memes that bind you close serve as well to isolate you from others. If everyone understood your encoded signals, would there be anything special about Bob? (Would there remain any positive reinforcement in it?)

Imagine now that Carol is a visitor, or perhaps she is new. Bob invited her along, saying, you’ll love it! It’s such a close-knit group! We’re all so close to each other! And Alice says, blah-and-blah, and Bob interprets it, but Carol doesn’t share the same background knowledge and inside experience that Alice and Bob share. She can tell that a signal is being sent, but she can’t interpret it, and it’s very much like being unable to solve a physics problem in her high school textbook. As time wears on, more and more signals that she receives but can’t interpret. Each one a little ping of failure against her psyche.

The in-group touting their closeness as the great virtue they feel it to be. Outside it all, Carol, alone, watching. At best, she is bored; at worst, she is sad and lonely.

Perhaps if there is something else that she shares with the group, something which resonates deeply with her, Carol will continue to spend time with them. Over time, she will come to recognize the signals and become more able to take part in that cryptic, shared culture. But the culture alone will not be enough to draw her in.

In all likelihood, one doesn’t simply waltz into a group and fit right in. Take care not to alienate the very people you love and wish to love you back.

Since the recent tragedy in Arizona, many people across the country from all ends of the political spectrum have come together to express their grief and offer comfort. But there are other voices who, in anger, jump quickly to lay blame. Then, there are the voices who, in defense of certain individuals, hastily attempt to spread far and wide across the nets the rumor that the shooter was a radical liberal.

I don’t know if it’s true, and I don’t care. What I do know is that certain individuals have used frequent gun imagery in their campaigns, and I call upon them to please stop. This is not to accuse them of having a significant role in the shooter’s actions, or even any role at all. It is a call to them to condemn violence.

For now, we do not need to agree who or what influenced the shooter, or whether he was a radical conservative or radical liberal or whatever. I can only hope that we all agree this was terribly sad. For now, I’m not trying to lay blame or accuse Republicans or anything, I just want everyone to agree that this event was sad, and that something like this should never happen again. If you don’t agree with this much, then I don’t know what to say. The victims were not criminals. They were citizens in different walks of life: elderly and young, some political, some everyday civilians. One was a young child. They did not deserve this.

It’s important that we try to prevent this from ever happening again. That we do everything we can to instill in the public a simple, fundamental truth: that it is terrible to point guns at innocent people. Can’t we agree on this much?

I think firearms metaphors in political rallies do the opposite. They make guns seem acceptable; they paint gun use as noble and patriotic. They suggest that weaponry is politically powerful. This might be true in the armed forces; it is definitely not true at civilian gatherings. Regardless of who’s at fault, it would be beneficial if we all agreed to do all we can to separate violence from our politics. No more gun imagery in political campaigns seems a good place to start.

If every politician publicly denounced gun imagery, issued a public promise to henceforth keep their campaigns free of weaponry, this sends a powerful message to the American public: that even if it is legal, even if it is a Constitutional right, weaponry in politics is socially unacceptable. Every bit as perfectly legal and socially unacceptable as the holding racist views. The nation’s politicians are seen by many as role models, and the party positions guide the personal opinions of many. A simple condemnation of violence issued by our politicians can make our country a safer place for free and open discourse.

I call upon our politicians to issue such a condemnation. Not for the sake of placing blame for Arizona’s shootings, but to prevent future tragedies. I beg our politicians from all parties, please, take this step to protect the people of a country founded on peaceful discourse.

Let us mourn the death of Bill Zeller, a Princeton graduate student and brilliant programmer. He died in an apparent suicide last week. Reproduced here is the verbatim text of his suicide letter, in which he explains his decision.

I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I’ll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe it’s true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning. I considered not writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up loose ends and don’t want people to wonder why I did this. Since I’ve never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely draw the wrong conclusions.

My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In kindergarten I couldn’t use the bathroom and would stand petrified whenever I needed to, which started a trend of awkward and unexplained social behavior. The damage that was done to my body still prevents me from using the bathroom normally, but now it’s less of a physical impediment than a daily reminder of what was done to me.

This darkness followed me as I grew up. I remember spending hours playing with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold, plastic blocks. Just waiting for everything to end. It’s the same thing I do now, but instead of legos it’s surfing the web or reading or listening to a baseball game. Most of my life has been spent feeling dead inside, waiting for my body to catch up.

At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming appealed to me for this reason. I was never particularly fond of computers or mathematically inclined, but the temporary peace it would provide was like a drug. But the darkness always returned and built up something like a tolerance, because programming has become less and less of a refuge.

The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime is covering me. I feel like I’m trapped in a contimated body that no amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I feel manic and itchy and can’t concentrate on anything else. It manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or constantly going to the gym. I’m exhausted from feeling like this every hour of every day.

Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It makes me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what feels like hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and furious. I’m reminded every morning of what was done to me and the control it has over my life.

I’ve never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought and then be interrupted by someone saying “Hi” or making small talk, unable to understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around, viewing the outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable to perform normal human niceties. I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.

Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would always find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to escape and it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were the result of the darkness. Obviously I’m responsible for every decision and action, including this one, but there are reasons why things happen the way they do.

Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven’t touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There’s no future here. The darkness will always be with me.

I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source of my problems instead of something that I’ll never be able to change. I thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling. I’m not sure why I ever thought that would change anything.

I didn’t realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my first relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness affected me personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be separated and protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as a possible escape from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began to realize how entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it is never going to release me. Instead of being an escape, relationships and romantic contact with other people only intensified everything about him that I couldn’t stand. I will never be able to have a relationship in which he is not the focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic interactions.

Relationships always started out fine and I’d be able to ignore him for a few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return and every night it’d be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long as we were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something good and kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would envelope her too and take her over and the evil inside me would surround her. I always felt like I was infecting anyone I was with.

Relationships didn’t work. No one I dated was the right match, and I thought that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him. Part of me knew that finding the right person wouldn’t help, so I became interested in girls who obviously had no interest in me. For a while I thought I was gay. I convinced myself that it wasn’t the darkness at all, but rather my orientation, because this would give me control over why things didn’t feel “right”. The fact that the darkness affected sexual matters most intensely made this idea make some sense and I convinced myself of this for a number of years, starting in college after my first relationship ended. I told people I was gay (at Trinity, not at Princeton), even though I wasn’t attracted to men and kept finding myself interested in girls. Because if being gay wasn’t the answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my orientation, but I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I’m straight, I will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness will never leave.

Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I’d ever met. Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren’t so fucked up. Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had left behind. But it didn’t matter because I couldn’t be alone with her. It was never just the two of us, it was always the three of us: her, me and the darkness. The closer we got, the more intensely I’d feel the darkness, like some evil mirror of my emotions. All the closeness we had and I loved was complemented by agony that I couldn’t stand, from him. I realized that I would never be able to give her, or anyone, all of me or only me. She could never have me without the darkness and evil inside me. I could never have just her, without the darkness being a part of all of our interactions. I will never be able to be at peace or content or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility of the romantic part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have realized this as soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with. It’s likely that things wouldn’t have worked out with her and we would have broken up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of relationships do) even if I didn’t have this problem, since we only dated for a short time. But I will face exactly the same problems with the darkness with anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not enough. Nothing is enough. There’s no way I can fix this or even push the darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy feasible.

So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn’t last because of the darkness and didn’t want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I’ve ever been able to talk about with anyone. Losing her was very hard for me as well. Not because of her (I got over our relationship relatively quickly), but because of the realization that I would never have another relationship and because it signified the last true, exclusive personal connection I could ever have. This wasn’t apparent to other people, because I could never talk about the real reasons for my sadness. I was very sad in the summer and fall, but it was not because of her, it was because I will never escape the darkness with anyone. She was so loving and kind to me and gave me everything I could have asked for under the circumstances. I’ll never forget how much happiness she brought me in those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I had originally planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it. (Parts of this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days before doing this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this were a possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we only dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She’s just one more person in a long list of people I’ve hurt.

I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I’ve had that were ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the darkness. I’ve hurt so many great people because of who I am and my inability to experience what needs to be experienced. All I can say is that I tried to be honest with people about what I thought was true.

I’ve spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time.

I’ve told different people a lot of things, but I’ve never told anyone about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people. The more harmful the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be betrayed. People don’t care about their word or what they’ve promised, they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone and have it be between just the two of you. I don’t blame anyone in particular, I guess it’s just how people are. Even if I felt like this is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened to me. At this point I simply don’t care who knows.

I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don’t kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don’t know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I’m capable of.

So I’ve realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated with it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically harming others.

I’m just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me the monster I am and there’s nothing I can do to escape it. I don’t know any other existence. I don’t know what life feels like where I’m apart from any of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel fundamentally broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke up one day in a human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world, living among creatures it doesn’t understand and can’t connect with.

I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling the comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what uncontimated intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with someone, someone who can be the recipient of all the love I have to give. I will never have children, and I wanted to be a father so badly. I think I would have made a good dad. And even if I had fought through the darkness and married and had children all while being unable to feel intimacy, I could have never done that if suicide were a possibility. I did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget about me quickly.

There’s no point in identifying who molested me, so I’m just going to leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.

You may wonder why I didn’t just talk to a professional about this. I’ve seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I’m positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was. And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it wouldn’t help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we’d hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through generations. All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it’s her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the “friends” who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I’d be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am. And yes, I realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they’re based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.

People say suicide is selfish. I think it’s selfish to ask people to continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won’t feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but it’s also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day.

Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people have it worse than I do, and maybe I’m just not a strong person, but I really did try to deal with this. I’ve tried to deal with this every day for the last 23 years and I just can’t fucking take it anymore.

I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who can feel the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who can experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant misery. I wonder who I’d be if things had been different or if I were a stronger person. It sounds pretty great.

I’m prepared for death. I’m prepared for the pain and I am ready to no longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do. My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.

—

I’d also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they’re dead–one with less hatred and intolerance.

If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.

They live in a black and white reality they’ve constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don’t understand that good and decent people exist all around us, “saved” or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.

A random example:

“I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the Koran, he will be a terrorist.” – George Zeller, August 24, 2010.

If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were “saved” at some point), that’s your choice, but it’s fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him.

Their church was always more important than the members of their family and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy their contrived beliefs about who they should be.

I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is going to Hell because she’s Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation. I could list hundreds of other examples, but it’s tiring.

Since being kicked out, I’ve interacted with them in relatively normal ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like having people I can talk to about what’s been going on in my life. Whatever the reason, it’s not real and it feels like a sham. I should have never allowed this reconnection to happen.

I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time. At other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly believe the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me very much and tried her best. One reason I put this off for so long is because I know how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since she found out I wasn’t “saved”, since she believes I’m going to Hell, which is not a sadness for which I am responsible. That was never going to change, and presumably she believes the state of my physical body is much less important than the state of my soul. Still, I cannot intellectually justify this decision, knowing how much it will hurt her. Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how much pain it will cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn’t deserve to live. All I know is that I can’t deal with this pain any longer and I’m am truly sorry I couldn’t wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this could be done without hurting anyone. For years I’ve wished that I’d be hit by a bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more acceptable, but I was never so lucky.

—

To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with all my shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the person I wanted to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a better person, maybe not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I never got very far.

I’m sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another option. I hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you can’t understand this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me.

Bill Zeller

—

Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don’t want people to wonder why I did this. I disseminated it more widely than I might have otherwise because I’m worried that my family might try to restrict access to it. I don’t mind if this letter is made public. In fact, I’d prefer it be made public to people being unable to read it and drawing their own conclusions.

Feel free to republish this letter, but only if it is reproduced in its entirety.

There is such a thing as seeking out trouble. It is advisable not to seek out trouble. But there is also such a thing as perfectly normal, daily, everyday activity that entails some small, avoidable risk, but is so ridiculous that it drives one furious. You can live your life locked inside your house with an escort every time you make a brief trip out. You can be a great parent who dotes on your children and gets them the best instruction and spoils them rotten and does everything in your power to protect them. But at some point, they will be a grumpy, surly College Student, and they will understand why you were so insistent upon safety that you never wanted them out of sight, not even for a Walk around the Lake in the Gated Community. They will understand why you’d get in your car and chase them down and bring them home, and disapproved of their chosen friends, and kept them inside except for the twenty minutes of twilight between skin-cancer sunshine and dangerous dark each day. They will understand, but they will not appreciate it.

Instead, they will rebel at even the mention of safety. It will be an ingrained, irrational, purely emotional reaction, that the idea of going out of the way for even reasonable precautions seems disgusting. Even when you say something perfectly reasonable, don’t be outside too late, try to keep someone with you, such a reasonable suggestion will make them furious. They will feel helpless and caged and paralyzed, not by fear of harm, but by the memory of the excessive precautions that tethered them to their backyard for the eighteen years of their life, only this time, they will be a College Student, and suddenly they will remember. And then, as soon as they get off the phone, they will step outside for an hour’s walk outside for some post-midnight alone time, only instead of keeping inconspicuous like you always said, they will sing into the night, and be very very happy. And even though they will never tell you about it, they will feel a lot better. The point is made. Even if you never know of it, they have proven to themselves that they can do this kind of stuff without repercussion, whenever and however they like, and then they begin to feel like a person again.

Don’t you tell me what’s not safe. I’m not listening.

And to think that I worried about getting my bottle of choir wine through U.S. customs.

Perhaps I ought to have worried about the Communist CD instead.

Today was decidedly interesting. My sister had a violin lesson. I’d forgotten how much I hated those. The whole day spent practicing, spent practicing the vibrato in agonizing slow motion. EEEurrrEEUReeurghEEEurrr. . . dreadful. And it wasn’t even her fault. There’s no way in the world to make really really slow vibrato sound decent. So I escaped the house and took a long, long walk.

It was warm and sunny. I could’ve worn shorts and not been cold. A very few days ago, I was so cold I couldn’t feel my face, and a pink-and-purple demon bike had tried to dump me into an ice-covered, traffic-ridden street in the middle of the night. That was also an interesting night, half a world away. It was all very surreal. Did the last four months really happen? My memories are terrible at evoking lengths of time. It might have been yesterday or a year ago, it might have lasted a week or a semester. Afterwards, when I think back on it, it all feels the same.

I was so excited to go to Budapest. The adventure of it all, plopping into an unfamiliar part of the world with no one to rely on, with not even the language to guide me home. Landing there, that first day, how confusing it all was, and how everything went wrong. Then, five weeks in, debating with Chuck Norris and Emmy whether we were half done or a third done. . . then finals. . . how could it be past?

When I was a fifth grader, there was this huge end-of-the-year field trip that we were all so excited about. All throughout that year, I told myself over and over again that someday, that field trip would be in the past, and I would look back to the “present” and say to myself, I knew it. Meaning that at some point, this thing that I was looking forward to would move from the future into the past, and I was aware of it. That was really a long time ago.

Yesterday during dinner, I’d put in the CD that I’d brought back, the Borond Odon. It’s an adorable collection of Hungarian children’s songs, sung in a pinchy voice, something about this Borond Odon who apparently sat on a black stone, and something about a helicopter. I fed it into Google translate and found myself more confused than before. Then today, in went the other CD. Earlier in the day, I’d played it for my sister without showing her what it was, and asked what it sounded like to her. She said it sounded like patriotism and nationalism. It was very close. It’s called Best of Communism, and it’s full of these march-sounding Communist songs. I wondered if it would sound familiar to my father.

My father has always taken an interest in anything and everything. Nights around the dinner table when I was younger, or sitting in the car, we would happen upon a topic, and he would promptly embark on a long rant about it. A lecture, of sorts. More often than not, it would be about math. The first time I saw the quadratic equation, it was in a comic strip. I was in sixth grade. My father felt the profound need to derive it for me, even though I was still learning how to solve linear equations in one variable. Later on, as I became more involved with mathematics, he’d choose more diverse topics, usually something from some competition, all beyond my ability at the time. I was always confused, and frustrated, but mostly confused. I could follow each step, but not why the proof worked as a whole, only that each step worked. I did not see the overarching structure; I was lost in the details, and I came to the conclusion that my father had lost touch with how to teach anyone younger than a college student.

It’s not until now, now that I am a college student, do I remember the great many other things he said, that have become so completely absorbed I take them for granted. Now, I realize that in his life, he’s seen a great many common errors and pitfalls of thought, and he made absolutely certain that no progeny of his ever spouts any of that illogic. Around four years old was when I began to form memories; at the time of my earliest memories, I remember my father making it absolutely clear to me that people are free to believe what they wish, but I was not to bother my neighbor with my beliefs, nor they us with theirs, and that a person’s freedom of belief stops right where thy neighbors’ begins. He’d reason out things until they made sense to him. Always logical to the point of impracticality, everything had to be logical to him before he’d be content, and whatever it took to make sense to him, that was how he explained it. It helped a great deal. The first day I brought home that opaque “entropy is a measure of disorder” and “entropy is always increasing” stuff, he sat me down and cleared it right up. No one’s going to understand if one says entropy is always increasing, and I certainly didn’t. On that day in middle school, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what it meant, how it applied to anything. It sounded like intelligent-sounding physics-speak for physics professors to me. He told me that I couldn’t make a car that keeps running forever without more fuel, no matter how efficient, and that eventually I’d have to put in more fuel. I thought about it a bit. It made sense. Since then, this most often (mis)quoted second law of thermodynamics has come up a great many times in school, in talks, in debates with people. It is always clear to me how the law works. It is always painfully obvious to me when someone begins with their “you can’t get more complicated life forms because of the second law talk,” that they have no idea what the law actually means, and that they are just quoting it from a textbook and misunderstanding it. Only now do I realize how grateful I actually am to have it clear in my mind.

But now I’ve made my father sound like a patriarch who runs around spouting math and lectures all the time. Close to true, but not entirely true. Oftentimes he would tell stories, but they’d always be the story of how this man caught a rabbit on day 0 and made rabbit stew or something. And then, on the nth day, he’d make stew with the leftover stew from day n-1. Meanwhile, on the nth day, every person who’d eaten stew on day n-1 would return to eat stew, except the most recent person would bring a friend with him. Eventually, the stew had something like r^n density of rabbit in it (0<r<1), and the man had n guests eating stew with him. By this point, the stew was pretty near indistinguishable from water, and that was the end of it. I did not understand. For many years, I did not understand. To this day, I’m not quite sure I understand.

Other times, they’d be renditions of historical events. It was a habit I picked up as well, for I’d waltz home from my history class and narrate the day’s lesson to my sister. But the version my father told was always a bit different from the version I heard in school. They were very interesting stories. Every rendition of China under Mao that I’d ever heard had him portrayed as the essence of evil dictator. My father’s version instead had a flawed human evil dictator, still evil, still responsible for a great deal of suffering, but also a sad man whose son and best friend died in a war, whose wife was taken captive and murdered by the rebel government in Taiwan, who wrote poetry, who put a swift and decisive end to the practice of foot-binding. Those are details that never come through in any class I’ve ever taken, and not that I automatically accept Mao as depicted by my father, but it is definitely interesting to hear about it. And his rendering of the Korean War was pretty unique as well.

So I was wondering if my father would recognize any of the Communist songs. Stupid of me. He recognized the first one right away, and knew it well. The International. Apparently, it was common to every communist country. He had grown up hearing it and singing it, and so had my mother, and so had my grandparents, and so had every single person in China who was not very young. He recited the lyrics in Chinese and translated them, and carefully explained to my sister and me the difference between Communism and Socialism in eight monosyllabic Chinese characters each. It was quite remarkable.

I once met a serious Communist in real life. He was standing on the corner of Old Campus last year, this elderly Asian guy with a very straight back and an armful of Communist pamphlets. Speaking in English and recruiting. He was very polite. He was much more polite than that proselytizing creep by Commons. He didn’t threaten me with hellfire and brimstone; didn’t insult me before turning his back on me and yell at all the passerby in a jeering tone, SHE’S AN ATHEIST!!11!!one!! as though I were some circus freak to be ridiculed, as though it were ok to ridicule people as freaks. He didn’t then proceed to automatically dismiss anything and everything I said. No, he was perfectly civil and asked me very politely to read the pamphlet.

I am not terribly fond of people who tell me I’m going to hell. They are not particularly pleasant.

In any case, to each their constitutional rights. But look at this chart, the one that says What the Public Knows about Religion (http://pewforum.org/other-beliefs-and-practices/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey.aspx), where it says that 68% of people surveyed know that “Constitution says government shall neither establish nor interfere with religion.”

If we extrapolate to the whole population, we estimate that nearly a third of Americans don’t know the fundamental principles of religious freedom. Isn’t that the most terrifying thing ever?

It’s been a while coming, this massive delayed blog of the past few months. It’s grown over 5000 words long already, and not even half of what I want to say has been said, so I guess I will have to serialize it. One update a day or so, to give me time to write the next “chapter.” Also, I haven’t the slightest clue what the title means. It seemed to fit. Anyways, here’s the prologue, which was actually written on the plane on the way back. This would have been written on Monday.

Unfortunately, I had to censor large parts of it. . . or the sappiness would have dissolved brains and made them ooze out of ears. . . I’m sorry. If you’d really really really like to see the censored parts, ask me and I’ll see which parts are presentable. Or maybe I’ll rewrite it in doublespeak once I’ve gotten the whole thing out.

I’d really like to get the whole record down here before I start forgetting everything. Anyways, here’s the prologue. The first real section, which is mostly a big rant about classes, will be up in a bit.

Peace and happiness!

—

There are scenes, brilliant scenes impressed into my mind, impressed into my soul were I not a soulless heathen, and I remember them, relive them a thousand times in my mind so that they cannot possibly be right, something must have changed in the memories, some mutations slipped through in the thousand compilings, but my goodness. . . ! My favorite (there are so many treasured ones!) was the moment. . . .

[snip1]

. . . or when the choir director made a speech for us, and then led the choir in songs. Some songs we knew, and some we didn’t, and there was nothing we could do but smile. I had been so happy then I couldn’t stop smiling that huge grin that covered my whole face, I was so happy and I loved the choir so much, and I looked over. . . .

[snip2]

Looking like a Cheshire cat, a happy Cheshire cat.

[snip3]

When you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams. . . .

Yay I have a pillanat of internet! In the words of Professor Hungarian Language, apparently a “pillanat” is such a unit of time that it could be a minute or an hour. And I need to write a long and rambling record of my travels. . . but the epilogue comes first. Because that’s happening right now.
“. . . ‘Cause the hardest part of this is leaving you. . . .” — My Chemical Romance

Epilogue: December 19, 2010, 16:10 Dusseldorf time

I am delayed! The flight out from Budapest was delayed by more than my layover in Dusseldorf, and the next flight out from Dusseldorf doesn’t leave until tomorrow. So I am camping in the airport hotel overnight. It is a very nice hotel room, but there is no free internet! I don’t know what to do except maybe in a bit, I’ll go down and try to buy a few minutes of internet. I think I have a few euros left over from my visit to Slovakia. Other than that, all is well. The airline gave me a voucher for dinner, and I have a big brick of beigli.

I met a sweet young lady with an adorable little daughter. She is a bit over a year old with pink round cheeks and large, curious eyes. They sat behind me on the plane today, and the little girl was a touch cranky, and didn’t want the festive strawberry gingerbread cookie I gave her. The mother was working towards a masters in something biology-related, but was taking some time off to teach math and science in a high school. They were also unable to catch their connecting flight, so we went to the airport hotel together. She was plain-dressed, bespectacled, and unadorned, but it’s very obvious that she is a very beautiful woman. And not lust-colored plasticky buxom beauty either, just quiet and gentle and sophisticated. The adorable little girl is possessed of an earsplitting wail, but she’s become quite cheerful now that we’re off the plane. They are a couple rooms down the hall from me.

Even though the voucher was for a single room, there are two twin-sized beds in here, pushed side by side. I would’ve thought it was intended to be a single bed, but for the two sets of blankets and pillows set out. I’m sitting all on one side of it because it would’ve been awkward sitting on the crack in the middle. A graey stormcloud blankets the city. The sky is a flurry of frosty swirls.

It’s hard to tell if I’m content. I would like internet. I would like to not be delayed. But this is a very nice place. Even so, I remember merry nights past, and the anticipation, and the impending doom. There was always something to look forward to and something to dread. I wanted to see the Requiem; anything could happen afterwards so long as I didn’t die before the Putnam; just the thought of making music gave me the activation energy to stumble out of bed and slog an hour across the city; my exams can deal so long as I can sing tonight; at last I get to perform a piece of music I’d longed, but never really expected, to play; I was going out to eat; I was staying in to cook; I was going to drink Red Bull for dinner; I was going to eat cake for every meal; I was going to math all night.

As many hugs as I could ever want lay always within reach.

And I know there is still the future to come, another day and semester and lifetime of adventure, and how exciting it will all be! But it’s so far away it hardly stirs me. Tonight, the world is quiet and solitary.

Had I been in Buda, with all public transport down late at night, still I would not have hesitated a moment to trek to Pest on foot for a final few memories. Anything to forestall the inevitable farewell a while longer.

—

I’m being sappy. I’m being really really sappy. I’m probably going to look back at this in a month or so and be pretty embarrassed. Le sigh. Future me can suck it up and deal.

Maybe I can find some internet and let my parents know not to expect me today. That would be nice. Peace, love, happiness.

P.S. A great many flights have been delayed the past couple of days. There are probably many of you out there, probably scattered across Europe, stranded. I do hope you all made it safely home!