Some two weekends ago, Tomas came to visit. We went to a great many places, and one of them was Castle Hill. Right in the middle of it stands this huge statue-in-a-wall of a hunter-looking fellow surrounded by people and hunting dogs. I’d been there once before with Emmy, and at the time, it was a fountain. That was in early September. Now, the air was cold, and the fountain was dry, and off to one side were dry boulders that formed something climbable, and I stared up at it longingly. Tomas followed my gaze upwards and said, “you should climb it.”

That was all the encouragement I needed, and a moment later, I was up in the statue. Tomas came up too, and we petted the stone hunting dogs and waved peace to the passerby who were peering curiously up at us. Then, we jumped down. As I walked away, I saw others, in turn, climbing up the statue and taking pictures in it, and I felt proud to have had some small impact on the doings of my fellow man.

So later, when we wound up at Hosok Tere (Heroes’ Square?), I was already emboldened by my earlier adventures. I remembered the first time I’d been there, back near the beginning of long ago. I’d wanted to walk home, and Heisenberg had shown it to me. We’d looked at the statues of all the guys, and the friezes depicting some great thing each one did, and every frieze was all some battle scene, and they all looked alike, so as to be the most uninspiring thing ever. We’d gone around each of the statues and told stories about their deeds, but we hadn’t actually known the real stories, so we’d just made up stories based on the uninspiring friezes. I’d nearly forgotten all the stories, but seeing them again, I began to remember some of the absurdities with which we’d come up. I’d pointed at the giant statue in the center and asked what it was, and he’d answered that it was kings or something. There were eight or nine of them, the grim skeletal crowned guys on horses, which this huge tower with some golden thing on top right in the middle. They looked like Nazguls. As I got closer, I could see their faces. They still looked like Nazguls.

But this time, I climbed up onto the pedestal, and gotten a close look at the horsemen with their great massive capes and enormous steeds, their base littered with broken beer bottles, and people’s signatures on the horses rumps. I’d wanted to sign my name as well, but then it was something I shouldn’t do, since I don’t wish that everyone sign their names onto statues. That would cover the statues with names, and ruin the statues. So I contented myself staring at them. They still looked like Nazguls.

Fast forward to this last weekend, when I spawned in Prague and stood on the Charles Bridge. For whatever reason, I guess I was being restless, and my mind was swirling with cluttered thoughts, and then I saw that statue. There was a metal grate on it that made a wide grid, and inside were three stone prisoners all making The Scream faces, and atop it stood a group of holier-than-thou self-righteous haloed stone jailers, and I wound up on top of the thing, among the lofty jailers, and when I looked back, a friend had followed me up, and I was happy to be up there with the wind blowing and the river below me.

Then came the ominous sound of the whistle.

There’s this sinking feeling you get where your heart falls into the river, and you know you’re in trouble, and there’s no way out. It’s that sense of impending doom when your teacher strolls up to you, and looks down at you with kindly eyes, and says “I notice you’re having trouble with the problem sets. . . perhaps you should come to my office.” And you know there is no escape, and all you can do is watch in horror as two policemen march to the base of the statue, arrayed in formal police regalia, complete with angry scowls. I almost fell off the statue getting off of it, and at the bottom, and my friend followed quickly, and at the bottom, the police demanded our passports. I arranged my face into an apologetic and worried expression, and explained that we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to. They weren’t convinced. They gestured angrily at the statue and said “HISTORIC BRIDGE,” their very persons the very embodiment of indignation. And then they fined us something like fifty dollars each, and spent a very long time copying data from our passports, very carefully, and I was beginning to get worried that they’d drag us to the police station, or send a message to the U.S. embassy, or throw us out of the Czech Republic, and that this incident would be attached to my official records forever and ever. Perhaps it is, I don’t know. But eventually, they let us go. I did not get in trouble again all that weekend.

They say that when you grow up, all your childhood wishes come true, all those times one wished they could skip naptime or not go to school or not read books. . . and then the universe laughs at you. So, too, I spent a great many years wishing I didn’t have to play piano, and now, now that all I want to do in the world is bang on a piano, I don’t have ready access to one anymore. I know I ought to study and do mathematics and work on my problem sets and sleep, but I just want to make music. It makes me happy. It occupies my mind and leaves no room to ponder; even math leaves a great deal of room for distractions, but playing the piano has to be done in time and in rhythm, so it’s much harder for the mind to wander. All I want to do is make music. If it weren’t for the piano in the lounge, I’m not entirely sure I’d be able to kick myself to school at all. I guess I’m hitting a mid-semester slump, or something. It’s a very bad time for a slump, but that’s just how it is, not wanting to cook, or sleep, or shower, or do anything at all.

Sigh. Life is full of things one doesn’t want to do. But I do know that I do want to do them in the long run. I do know that a month or a week or anytime in the future, I will wish that I had done them, or be glad that I had done them. It is easy to wish stuff upon one’s past or future self. Probably it’s just too late at night, and bedtime. In the morning, the sun will rise, and the world will be beautiful, and I won’t understand where all this slothiness came from. From where all this slothiness came.

Peace and happiness.

Heisenberg: Also, I’ve been avoiding you so I don’t have to tell you that I actually broke your violin.

me: . . . you’ve been doing no such thing

Heisenberg: I pulled out the strings and pawned them.

me: just the strings? roffles

Heisenberg: Then I used the rest to warm my house before realizing I have a heating system.

me: even though i don’t believe you, just reading that kind of tears up my nonexistent atheist’s heart a bit

Heisenberg: I then whittled the splinters into tiny little crosses and donated them to the Church.

Daylight savings on October 31st? Who in the world does daylight savings on October 31st?

Besides the obvious, I mean. And in this direction?

Daylight savings used to confuse me to no end. I’d sit there arguing with myself, it used to be 8, but now it’s 7, so when it’s 5 now, then it used to be. . . and on and on it went, and I was never convinced either way. One day, my father caught me at it, and he put a very swift end to that. Forget all this it-used-to-be business. With the brevity of a mathematician who can spit out a full sentence in less than ten characters, he told me, “old 8, new 7.” Yes, I agreed. Okay then, he said. Old 6, new 5. I thought about that. It seemed to make sense.

It was 17:00 yesterday, and I was in class. I looked out the window. Outside was pitch black. I remembered from the opera house, old 19:00 = new 18:00. So old 18:00 = new 17:00. Was that right? It sounded right. The sun rises at around old 7:00, so that’s the new 6:00. It got dark at the old 18:00, new 17:00. I looked at the lack of light outside the window. That looked right.

But wait a minute. The sun sets earlier in winter? When the sun sets earlier anyways, and now it sets even earlier still? What? How in the world is this supposed to make sense at all? Whose bright idea was this anyways?

I woke up and took stock of myself. The sun was rising, and I’d apparently fallen asleep, lights on and contacts in, on the couch yet again. I tried to remember the night before, and got the faint impression of setting my computer to download Clannad and playing Kingdom of Loathing. That was right, it was 6 in the morning, barely after midnight in Dragon Cave time. Or so I thought.

I spent the better part of that day alternately playing Clannad and catching virtual dragons, impatiently awaiting the evening. Around 16:00 (or so I thought), I prepared to retrieve Heisenberg, commuted over to retrieve Heisenberg, and was forced into primping like a ridiculous socially-acceptable person, in order to be presentable at the opera house and not receive the glares of the venerable elderly. A long time ago, the actor who plays Commodore Norrington in Pirates of the Caribbean said his costume felt like fruitcake, and I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it seems to fit; something about wearing a frilly skirt feels like fruitcake, and I can only imagine that I looked as absurd as Heisenberg did. (And then, I suddenly realized it was Halloween.) But a reluctant grooming and a solid round of insults later, we landed at the opera about twenty minutes before 19:00. Or so I thought.

Verdi’s Requiem was scheduled to begin at 19:00, so by 18:58, when the theater was still closed, I was getting a bit worried. The lady at the ticket counter told me the theater didn’t open until 18:30. I looked at my watch. 13:18, which translates to 18:59 when you +6 to the hour and -19 to the minutes. But, it’s past 18:30, I protested. The lady insisted it was 18:00 right now, and there was still a half hour to go. And that was when Heisenberg said something about Hungarian daylight savings.

And then, the performance began. It was absolutely glorious, and fire and brimstone, and the most epic amazing! And it sounded different being in the audience rather than among the second sopranos, because everything is weighted different. Before, all I could hear was the other sopranos, and snatches of other parts, but now there were times when I couldn’t even tell where the sopranos were, but for the most part I knew the text of what everyone was singing, and it was really really cool. The chorus was about 100 or 150 people, and everything was pronounced with absolute clarity, even the soft parts. Right where they were going quantus tremor est futurus, where the whole thing is whispered like a dance around a witch’s brew, it gave me the creeps, it was spectacular. They even managed to pronounce both “t”s in et terra, in the Libera Me, which was something I never managed to do, even though I tried every time we went through that part. And the orchestra, that section before the Tuba Mirum, with the trumpets high above in the alcoves, they actually had the trumpets up above and the trumpets in the orchestra synchronized. I hadn’t even heard recordings where they got that right, but they got it this time. And then, the bass drum with its thump of distant thunder right at the start of Mors Stupebit, it was gorgeous.

Nonetheless, brilliant as Verdi was, I am still not fond of the Agnus Dei. Every single person in that performance, soloists, chorus, and orchestra, every single one of them were all on the same note in that Agnus Dei, and I couldn’t help but think it sounded like zombies. Zombies, an orchestra-sized mob of them, all stumping forth, lackluster and stiff.

There is a universal law of the universe that shall never be broken, and that is that every bass singer in the world must be a roundish, stout fellow with a round, balding head, and a voice so resonant that the very ground beneath the theater shakes. When that bass soloist sang, even with the full orchestra blaring and the chorus squalling and a tenor and two women shrilling away at the same time, it didn’t matter, and all anyone could hear was that bass singer with his face all red and a voice that rang like I couldn’t believe. And then the tenor, towering over the bass singer, with a Phantom of the Opera Raoul-type voice like a knight of purity and virtue, and when he sang his mouth would deform into weird shapes. Then, the soprano, with feathery red hair and a glittering black dress, who sang clear and sweet, like moonlight breaking through the clouds. And the mezzo, I was really impressed with the mezzo! There was something passionate and earthy in the voice, something like all those Homeric epics with the wailing of the women on judgment day, and there was fire and brimstone, and it was a glorious judgment day!

After a couple hours sitting in a beanbag tea house, laughing over the difficulties of inconsistencies of measurement, I found myself at Heisenberg’s apartment, rushing to cram everything into my backpack before public transportation shut down for the night. It was pretty absurd, like something out of a strange anime. I left the apartment sometime after 23:10 and got to the blue station at 23:18, three minutes or so before the metro got in. At each station, there’s a little clock that counts how much time has passed since the last metro left; it was sitting at 8 minutes when I got to Deak Ferenc. Red metros usually come by every ten or so minutes at night, so it seemed to be good timing. At 12 minutes, the red metro pulled in.

There is something a bit unsettling about sitting in a traincar at night with the intercom blaring that the last metro would leave in three minutes, and that was when I actually realized that this really was the last one of the night. Instead of leaving, it sat there for another few minutes while the intercom voice said all transfers are leaving in two minutes, and then ninety seconds. I kept looking to that sign with the timer counting up, and the clock time next to it, and my mind was playing Takaki’s train journey from Five Centimeters per Second, and then the doors slid shut at 23:35.

Hardly anyone was at Moszkva Ter, and one side of the exit was already sealed. It was a while before the 61 tram came by, and I was relieved when it did even though I knew the last one hadn’t passed yet. When I looked back, the metro exit was shut and locked for the night. The first metro car had maybe five people or so in it, and the second was empty, so I climbed into the second and sat by the heater. Since no one else was in it, no one would let in cold air getting off.

At first I took no notice of it, but the sign kept saying the name of the stop some four stops from mine, and the announcement-com kept spewing something about that same stop and playing this happy little jingle, that I was starting to get the vague impression that the tram was only going so far. Sure enough, when the stop came, everyone else got off, and I quickly followed suit. Where the tracks split, the tram trundled off down the other way to sleep for the night, and I was grateful to no longer be on it. And then, I was annoyed to no longer be on it, and resigned myself to walking the rest of the way.

I trudged home and spent the remainder of the weekend sitting on the couch, thinking, I should do math, and playing computer games. Tomorrow is a problem set and a midterm, and the day after brings another midterm and three problem sets, and then Saturday brings some local competition thing. Life is the epic frantic. I wish it would hurry up and snow, so bugs will stop piling up in my ceiling lights. I don’t even know how they keep getting in, but it’s pretty disgusting. Guess I’ll eventually have to call the landlord about it. It’s really giving me the creeps.

We live in a world where some people use reason, some value human life, and some have technology. However, there are a great many more people with access to technology than people who would grieve over a stranger’s death, a great many people who could believe, really be convinced that one of their fellow man was an enemy. This is a place where the sanctity of one man’s right to arbitrarily brand another worthy of the worst torments is upheld without question, with the utmost respect, and the hell with it.

Enter Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality):

“Um,” said the shadowy figure. “It doesn’t really work like that. That’s what I was trying to warn you about here, Draco. You can’t make the answer come out to be anything you like.”

“You can always make the answer come out your way,” said Draco. That had been practically the first thing his tutors had taught him. “It’s just a matter of finding the right arguments.”

“No,” said the shadowy figure, voice rising in frustration, “no, no, no! Then you get the wrong answer and you can’t go to the Moon that way! Nature isn’t a person, you can’t trick them into believing something else, if you try to tell the Moon it’s made of cheese you can argue for days and it won’t change the Moon! What you’re talking about is rationalization, like starting with a sheet of paper, moving straight down to the bottom line, using ink to write ‘and therefore, the Moon is made of cheese’, and then moving back up to write all sorts of clever arguments above. But either the Moon is made of cheese or it isn’t. The moment you wrote the bottom line, it was already true or already false. Whether or not the whole sheet of paper ends up with the right conclusion or the wrong conclusion is fixed the instant you write down the bottom line. If you’re trying to pick between two expensive trunks, and you like the shiny one, it doesn’t matter what clever arguments you come up with for buying it, the real rule you used to choose which trunk to argue for was ‘pick the shiny one’, and however effective that rule is at picking good trunks, that’s the kind of trunk you’ll get. Rationality can’t be used to argue for a fixed side, its only possible use is deciding which side to argue. Science isn’t for convincing anyone that the blood purists are right. That’s politics! The power of science comes from finding out the way Nature really is that can’t be changed by arguing! What science can do is tell us how blood really works, how wizards really inherit their powers from their parents, and whether Muggleborns are really weaker or stronger -”

If your rule is “believe what this person told you,” or “believe what you observe,” or “believe in the book that this person told you to believe in,” then however effective that rule is at picking valid statements, that’s the kind of belief you’re going to get. Well, come in and read of topics in science, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, and a vast array of other fields. Watch Harry attempt a proof of P=NP with a time turner. And in the meanwhile, receive (from this humorous and fascinating dialogue) the tools to evaluate not only your beliefs, but your very rules. Even if you disagree with what the author has to say, it will be a spectacular ride, for you need not believe in magic to enjoy Harry Potter.

It is a service to the world that as many people know as much of rationality as possible, and so, I beg of you, if you ever have even a few minutes, sit down a read a chapter. I promise it is something the likes of which has never been seen.

—

“To pass your test,” Harry said, “I’m going to have to say what it means to me, . . . . So my version of the thought, Draco, is that when we go out into the stars, we might find other people there. And if so, they certainly won’t look like we do. There might be things out there that are grown from crystal, or big pulsating blobs… or they might be made of magic, now that I think about it. So with all that strangeness, how do you recognize a person? . . . You would have to recognize them as people from their minds. And even their minds wouldn’t work just like ours do. But anything that lives and thinks and knows itself and doesn’t want to die, it’s sad, Draco, it’s sad if that person has to die, because it doesn’t want to. Compared to what might be out there, every human being who ever lived, we’re all like brothers and sisters, you could hardly even tell us apart. . . they’d just see a human being. Humans who can love, and hate, and laugh, and cry; . . . that would make us all as alike as peas in the same pod. They would be different, though. Really different. But that wouldn’t stop us, and it wouldn’t stop them, if we both wanted to be friends together.”

[snip]

“I have a dream,” said Harry’s voice, “that one day sentient beings will be judged by the patterns of their minds, and not their color or their shape or the stuff they’re made of, or who their parents were. Because if we can get along with crystal things someday, how silly would it be not to get along with Muggleborns, who are shaped like us, and think like us, as alike to us as peas in a pod? . . . How impossible is it to imagine that the hatred poisoning Slytherin House would be worth taking with us to the stars? Every life is precious, everything that thinks and knows itself and doesn’t want to die. Lily Potter’s life was precious, and Narcissa Malfoy’s life was precious, even though it’s too late for them now, it was sad when they died. But there are other lives that are still alive to be fought for. Your life, and my life, and Hermione Granger’s life, all the lives of Earth, and all the lives beyond, to be defended and protected, EXPECTO PATRONUM!”

It’s passages like these that speak most of all, not just about humans killing each other, but death at all. For Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres does not accept death as the inevitable end, refuses the idea that people might have to die, and goes about it in a much more active way than this silly blogger went about praying and groveling (this was exactly a year ago today! I still consider it the best piece of writing I’ve ever produced. http://wobster109.xanga.com/715692309/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends/). But I know that Harry in this story deals with the same thing, and that Dumbledore would never understand. Chapters like these especially, they speak of a dream that I’d previously not even dared to think, not since I gave up my hopes of existing in heaven.

And to close off, this magnificent passage that, I believe, is a fitting response to all those who have accused me, by virtue of my atheism, of not caring if people run around stealing and hurting others and being selfish:

[Dumbledore asks Harry what he would do with eternity]

Harry took a deep breath. “Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild’s tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild’s hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we’ve explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I’m a lot more hopeful now that I’ve discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines.”

[snip]

The young boy stood very straight, his chin raised high and proud, and said: “There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don’t care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don’t have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us!”

Recently, this most appalling article appeared in the venerable Yale Herald. If I may quote one of the more ridiculous passages:

“Does anyone know what a Cardigan Welsh Corgi looks like?” asked Schwartz, referring to a type of small dog that had become central to the rabbi story. A man in the audience said not only did he know what one looked like, but that he had one—and not only did he have a Cardigan Welsh Corgi, but it had won a blue ribbon in a herding contest that very day. “No you don’t! No it didn’t!” screamed Schwartz, as the audience shivered with the synchronicity of it all. “Wow,” murmured an old woman as Schwartz reached his finale: “How many Christian Kabbalists who know numbers are performing a service for a Corgi with a connection to Kabbalah?”

That’s right. Coincidence masquerading as science under a fancy name (“synchronicity”), by people who don’t even understand statistics. As if that weren’t enough, they go so far as to claim they foresaw 9/11.

Please give this ridiculous piece of garbage a piece of your mind. I’d appreciate forever and ever. http://yaleherald.com/news/%E2%80%98there-must-be-something-going-on-here%E2%80%99/

I need to go on a rant! All the flies in my room are dying gruesome deaths. . . the number of shadows in the ceiling light went from 2 to 4.5, one of the ones I WATCHED as it flew in and baked to death, and now there’s a new shadow that is about 1.5 TIMES AS BIG as a regular fly, and then last night, I heard a buzzing above my head. It was a fly stuck in a spiderweb. This morning, it was still there, but all wrapped-up looking and it looked like a mummy. Then, I got back from school, and. . .

it was GONE.

I have no idea where it is. It might have fallen into my couch bed. I searched and couldn’t find it, and it’s not on the floor around either, it’s just. . . not anywhere. There is a dead fly in here somewhere, and I have no idea where.

Any moment, I think that I might be stepping on, or sitting on, or sleeping in dead fly.

All of yesterday, not a single thing went right. Not a single thing.

sigh

I’m actually being quite unfair. A great many things went right yesterday, but quite a handful of things also went wrong, and either I rant about yesterday, or I shall have to settle down and actually do homework like I should.

It all started shortly after midnight, when a fly was buzzing around the room. I watched it fly around. Drawn towards the light, it flew under the ceiling light’s cover, and then it started buzzing around frantically. All I could see through the cover was a shadow that I knew was it, but the shadow was crashing into a couple of other very similar shadows, and I suddenly realized those two other shadows were dead flies. Suddenly, the fly became still. All this had taken maybe five seconds, and I imagine the fly had been scorched to death. I keep imagining stumbling into a baking, barren wasteland and seeing before my eyes the scorched remains of two others of my species, and it’s been hovering at the edge of my awareness ever since that there are dead flies up there. And after all that, there were still bugs flying around, what the heck? Only this one was large, maybe twice the size of a fly in two out of three dimensions, and I was super annoyed.

I had the worst dream sequence. A hideous troll had taken over this couch in the common room that I use as a bed. Even though my own bed is not more than ten feet away, I still sleep in the common room, and I think it’s because there is no internet in the bedroom. Anyways, in my dream, there was this loathsome troll in my couch-bed, and I had to find somewhere else to sleep. But I’d set many alarms, so for a long while, I was half-awake-half-asleep, and I knew that I was supposed to go to class and go sing. But I was still dreaming. I was wandering around a store, and I pulled out a book and began to read. A long time had passed when I stopped, and it was getting dark outside, but I couldn’t find the public transportation station, it was either a bus station or a tram station. I had missed all my classes for the day, and I had missed singing, and I worried that the choir director would throw me out for missing practice my second week, and that I’d missed too many classes. Then, I realized that I hadn’t missed singing after all, only class. Then, I realized that Monday hadn’t happened yet, and I hadn’t missed class after all, and I was relieved. I guess I was more awake than asleep at this point. Anyways, I knew it was Monday, and that I should write my weekly Hungarian diary entry assignment. So I opened it to read Professor Hungarian Professor’s corrections from last week, but there were so many! There were pages and pages of corrections, and at the end, she wrote that it was so bad I wasn’t to come to class again, and I was horrified.

I woke up and began to LaTeX solutions in a frantic hurry. Meanwhile, I felt something itchy on my leg, and when I reached to brush at it, I touched something that skittered. It was a live spider. I watched, fascinated, as it crawled away. Just a few minutes ago, I had to poke a spider off my couch-bed, and I believe it was the same one. I got up to go to class, and then i realized i’d forgotten my metro pass. Just as I was going out the door, I realized I’d forgotten my choir music, so I went back to get it. And then I left for real, and got most of the way to the tram station, when I realized I’d forgotten my building access key, and then I had to go back to get it, and I was later than ever before getting to class. I sat down and prepared to type my algebra homework, when I suddenly got the sinking feeling that I’d left it at home.

I borrowed the problem statements from Heisenberg and typed the stupid things, and then I went to buy bread, and I forgot to swipe the key card on the way out, and ran smack into the turnpike. Then, on the way back in, I DID remember to swipe the card, but the turnpike stuck anyways, and then the glass doors closed behind me, and I just got stuck in the triangle of glass door and turnpike.

Sometime during the day, I remembered the piece of my computer that had chipped and come off. I’d put it into my pocket. But then, I remembered the hole in my pocket, and thought, oh no, it’s probably fallen out. Something in my mouth felt strange. I’d bitten myself about a week ago, and whenever I do, the bite always turns into a raging cold sore. This time was no exception. But it almost felt like there were two sores in my mouth, like my top teeth and my bottom teeth had both made indents or something. I looked in the mirror after class, and sure enough, there were two of the blasted things.

I left to go to choir, but right as i got out the door, I realized I’d forgotten how to get there, so I went back to look it up on Google maps. Plus five minutes to my time getting there. On the way, I stopped for fries, but they were super salty, so I stopped for a bottle of water. The store sat on a corner; the exit and the entrance were on different streets, and I went perpendicular to the street I should’ve been on for awhile. Plus another few minutes getting there. And then, when I finally landed at the place, I forgot which floor it was supposed to be on, so wander around being lost for a bit, and plus a few more minutes getting there, and then I got home.

I checked my jacket pocket, and the little piece of computer was gone. Instead of doing homework, I just went to sleep, and not a single thing got done that night.

It’s been one heckuva half month, and I’ve forgotten loads of it already. It’s kind of an unfortunate choice, that the outcome of enjoying life too much to blog about it means not remembering it so well later on. But life being too awesome to take time out of it blogging is a good thing, is it not? So I’ll just present a few highlights. . . .

I didn’t think he’d actually do it. We were making soup, and pseudo random number generating to determine whose turn it was. We’d each hold out a nonnegative integer number of fingers, and take the sum mod 2, and I was even and Heisenberg was odd, and it landed on Heisenberg. He was all, “maybe I’ll put in tea!” and I didn’t think he’d actually do it, so I called his bluff. Right up until the last moment, I thought he was bluffing, until I saw the tea actually go in.

I didn’t think he’d actually do it. We were making more soup a few days later, only this time we were just each putting in anything and everything we thought should be in it, and as of that moment, the soup had noodles, eggs, salt, curry powder, paprika, carbonara sauce, several types of ham and sausage, and probably more besides. He asked if there was anything else it needed, and I answered that it looked done to me, except it was too yellow. It needed to be more brown, I said. Next thing I know, he’s standing over the pot with a dollop of chocolate ice cream, and I really didn’t think he’d actually do it. Not until I saw the ice cream go in. And after all that, it tasted like water. What the frac is up with this?

There is a certain type of door/window that they make in Hungary, that can either swing open like a regular door, or the top of it leans down, so that it’s open a crack, and one can stick one’s hand through it, but it’s way too small to fit through it. I found this out when Heisenberg locked me on the balcony, and then opened the stupid window-door in the window direction, and it was the most infuriating thing ever. You can’t get in, but you can stick your hand into the room, and it’s kind of open, and it’s so close to being inside, but absolutely impossible. . . and then he tried to light my hair on fire.

I don’t know why it happens, but there’s this mindset I get stuck in, where I so loathe to do mathematics, and I absolutely don’t want to start my homework, but it nags at me because I know it must be done. So I sit there telling myself, I need to do math. And then I don’t do it. But because I know I ought to, I can’t do anything else either. I’m absolutely paralyzed by not wanting to do math, but knowing that I need to, and next thing I know I’ve just sat on the couch for some two hours, and not a single thing gets done. I signed up for eight classes. The abroad form where I fill out classes only gave me six boxes, and my dean only ever lets me take 5.5. A regular courseload is four. It seemed like such a good idea when I was signing up for classes, and now it’s starting to pwnz0r my butt, but I’m not sorry. But six problem sets a week is kind of getting to me a bit, and Professor Hungarian Professor wants a diary entry written in Hungarian each week, and Professor Modern Science is doing a midterm tomorrow, and Professor Abstract Algebra is doing a midterm on Friday. Life is the epic exciting! But sleep is going by the wayside.

Two weekends ago, I went to Bratislava (in Slovakia) to visit Tomas, a friend from high school. He’s been a bit cut off from the rest of us, and he showed me his university and city and malls. We visited the castles in Bratislava, and sat on a wall and looked at the river. Tomas pointed out the windmills and told me that was Austria, and I was amazed that it was just another country, just right there. The river below the wall looked much like the Danube, and it was the Danube; it looked the same as in Hungary. I remembered taking the train there, how there wasn’t anything to mark crossing from one country to another, and then i remembered that they had not inspected me much when I entered the EU. Just run everything through a scanner, checked my violin to make sure it was really a violin, and that was it. No customs or declaring stuff or forms or any of that. It is a land without any borders, this European Union, and I am so fond of it, this land without borders. All is not quite a fairy tale; I’m told that Slovakians and Hungarians don’t actually get along because of some nationalism thing that happened not that long ago, but it is still nothing like the fences and guards that they keep posting along the Mexico-US border. Not even like the highly individual customs checks that happen along the (considered friendly!) Canada-US border.

We talked about a great many things, and we talked about Mr. D, and we made a wish on a fountain that he was well and happy and seducing the Virgin Mary in heaven. It does sound like something he would do. We concluded that he would have very quickly gotten himself booted from heaven. Of course I don’t believe in any of that, but it is pleasant to think such happy thoughts for even a short while, and to imagine an alternate world where Mr. D is well and happy and doing everything he loved most. The first thing that came to mind was doing your mom in bed. I’ve probably been using your mom as an all purpose retort a bit too much.

On Monday, I followed (I’m running out of pseudonyms!) Dirichlet to the choir and said, please let me sing. And the gentleman said yes! He led the thing in Hungarian, and I couldn’t really tell what was going on except whenever he made fun of us, but it was super-awesome!

Last week was a friend’s birthday. Of course, he threatened to lock me out, threatened to avoid me all day, insisted on no making a fuss, and all that garbage. I had to try hard to spread out gift-giving over a great many days, starting with inconspicuous small things, so that over the course of a week, they added up to a fair amount of fuss. It all worked out. The night before I was to be locked out, I got kind of grumpy and wrote him a poem. It began with something like “I hate your face you stupid troll,” and ended with something like “I want to see you nevermore,” and somewhere in the middle, it bade him to do the world a favor and pull a Silvia Plath, please. I was not a nice person that night. It was written carefully on nice paper too, lol.

Some time last week, I finally learned to print stuff out from the computer lab. The first thing I did was print out a great many pages of sheet music. The piano is a creaky old creature; the keys are all out of tune and the floor pedal squeaks like a demon imp, but I adore the creature all the same. So there I was flailing away and creaking away, and I hear a scuffling behind me. Looking up in horror, I see Heisenberg standing on a chair under the ceiling light, carefully balancing my shoes on the ceiling light, and then he takes the chair and sits under it. He is taller than me (everyone is taller than me!), and I nearly fell off a chair trying to reach over him and retrieve my shoes, the stupid stink face.

On Friday, some twenty of us left classes early to attend a colloquium in Szeged, and then to see the city. Heisenberg asked what we were doing that night, and I remembered earlier that our group leader Chuck Norris had mentioned getting drunk and going clubbing. I was a bit apprehensive, but I remembered drinking and clubbing with my dearly beloved Guild of Carillonneurs (I miss you lots!) in Canada last spring, and I remembered that I had loved to dance. So after we got our rooming all figured out, we set out in some two or three groups to find food and booze. Well, we certainly found a lot of that. I drank as much as I could, which was not much, since it all tasted pretty bad. But I was tipsy enough that the room spun whenever I stood, and my thoughts came slower than usual, and Heisenberg was able to light a strand of my hair on fire before I noticed anything. I went to the restroom (Canadians call it a “washroom!”) and recited the convolution function to myself, just to convince myself that I could still think, and then we found the club.

I do love to dance! It was super awesome, and there’s something about it that makes one say, project to infinity with being afraid to look foolish! And eventually, everyone converged onto the club, and I actually danced with people, and it was a whole lot of fun. There was a bar inside the club also, and at some point, people got a bit too drunk, and some drinks got spilled, and then it was time to leave. But I remember dancing for a bit with one super-drunk Nagel, and he’d told me to sleep with one of the guys or something like that? It was quite strange. But then, he said, “you’re cute. You’ll make a man very happy someday.” And weirdly enough, even coming from a drunk guy, it means a lot to me.

Back at school again, and now it is Monday again. I’m about to go singing again, and I’ve just finished Hungarian class. Professor Hungarian Professor gave us a weekly song, but instead of a cheery silly song, today’s was this gorgeous poem written by a Jewish Hungarian poet. At least I am told it is beautiful, as my Hungarian is so abysmal that even with translations, the aesthetics is lost on me. His name was Radnóti Miklós, and he died in the Holocaust. This specific poem was written on (I believe) an anniversary, and it was a love poem to his wife. I reproduce it here in the hopes of reading it and understanding it someday. By the way, I do understand the literal meaning of it, but not the poetry or the artistry of it, and that will take more than a translation to capture.

“Két karodban ringatózom
csöndesen.
Két karomban ringatózol
csöndesen.
Két karodban gyermek vagyok
hallgatag.
Két karomban gyermek vagy te
hallgatlak.
Két karodban átölelsz te
ha félek.
Két karommal átölellek
s nem félek.
Két karodban nem ijeszt majd
a halál nagy
csöndje sem.
Két karodban a halálon,
mint egy álmon
átesem.“

Peace, love, happiness.

It is some obscure hour in the middle of the night, I’m all behind on homework, nothing in the world is working out, and to top it all off, the laundry machine won’t turn on. I looked in the manual and everything, and it details how to install, repair, and drain the thing, but not something so simple as turning it on! Argh.

I guess I should say something substantial. Classes are going not great, not terrible. I think I’ve spent two weeks or so in some kind of perpetual high-on-life, and now it is time to come back down. Another memory and another huggle in an ever-growing heap of treasures. I need to sleep. Enough of this being a ridiculous emo person. I’ll get around to updating for real soon, I promise.