last week may have been one of the worst weeks of my life. you might say the proverbial shit hit the thermantidote. i won’t go into details, because this is no place to get personal. but i’m a boosh interrupted afloat in a sea called Flowliness with no forseeable boundary. i just hope it has a happy ending.
my week from hell resulted in the resurgence of my smoking habit. first i was having a smoke and a beer at night to calm me down. then i was having a smoke and a cup of tea in the morning to get me going. cigarettes are evil. so i quit again, last saturday at midnight. a week ago i set sunday at midnight as my quit day, but as the week went on, and the pack got lighter at ever increasing rates, i realized that the longer i waited to quit, the harder it would be. and just a 24 hour difference in my quit date meant that today, monday, i’m already feeling better and less toxic. it’s funny, because yesterday quitting wasn’t so hard. i felt shitty, my lungs hurt, i wanted to feel better. now as i’m feeling better, i’m craving more. i’ve also found that having someone to take care of really takes my mind off of ciggies. but today, woe is me, i’m all alone. but i kept face by leaving the house for school, printing some articles, cleaning my desk, and hitting the gym for the first time in weeks. my workout was aimless, but it felt good to sweat. i felt like i was getting lots of things — nicotene, tar, heartache, finals — out of my system.
my attitude about quitting smoking is better this time. those of you who were around during the hynposhrink era know that i wasn’t really all about quitting, but i rationally knew i had to. irrationally, however, i still loved the company of the friend i paid to keep. now, i just wanna feel clean. i want my mouth to taste good when i wake up in the morning. and i really don’t want to sneak out of my parents house late at night in the cold to have one precious cigarette. (frankly, i think mom was onto my evening “walks” last christmas.) more importantly, i don’t want to have to explain any more cigarette burns on car apolstery.
in the end, last week’s hell was good education. i learned the following:
- smoking is the devil. if i am willing to give into temptation even once, i must be prepared to sacrafice my life and my dollars to giving into that temptation 1000’s of times
- sufficient statistics are easy if you take the right notes and prepare an mp-style outline before approaching the problem.
- statistics is hard in its requirement of a comprehensive understanding of the material.
- i’m very poor at developing a comprehensive understanding of anything
- honesty is always the best policy
- no matter how much it hurts, it’s not the end of the world
- 3 beers, 1 hydrocodone, 1 can of diet Coke, 1/4 bag of popped microwave popcorn results in the worst barf fest ever
- making fun of people is bad
- drinking too much is bad
- i want to be a better person.
i learned lots of other stuff but that’s for me to know and you to find out.
which brings me to the present. although my classes are over, i continue to struggle with the ever pressing matter of finding a thesis topic. i’m trying to get excited about phylogentic networks, but i’m finding that my limited knowledge of biology is making these articles from BIOLOGY JOURNALS a little tedious. this is frustration because i think i could like what i’m reading if i knew what the standard implementation of gamma distributed heterogeneity was. or rather, what is gamma distributed heterogeneity? and do i even care? furthermore, i want a cigarette. and this paper would read much better outside on my porch while i puff puff the day away. i shouldn’t be reading. i should be running around cleaning and biking and lifting and keeping my mind off smoking.
such is life. hurray for caffeine and uppers. times like these i feel like i did the right thing by going into mathematics. strangely enough, as soon as i wrote that, i began to question the very statement. i wonder if math has jaded me. when i was younger, i wanted to study astronomy because it was beautiful and eternal and greater than anything human (like politics - ugh), and therefore more fundamental. but then i realized that i didn’t like observational astronomy because it involved too much guesswork. and i wasn’t very good at memorizing names of processes in stellar evolution. but i did like the mathematical models. now i see everything in the world as a sequence of random events, and the best way to understand the world is to figure out the mathematics behind its processes and put them in a computer. mechanics, thermodynamics, pretty pictures. but the more i do this, the more i understand that none of it really matters. the andromeda galaxy that i used to marvel at as one of the only galaxies outside of our milky way that i could really see through my small 4.5in telescope, now decomissioned, is just a bunch of stars swirling around a black hole because physics says so. i still get excited when there’s a meteor shower in town, and i might even go outside at night and look for a few. but it always makes me a little sad. i think i’m sad that i never really had the brains or the gusto to come up with my own good ideas about how stuff works. and yet i still think i’m too smart to believe in god. ignorance must be bliss, because if i thought there was something meaningful to all this randomness, maybe i’d have an easier time being awe-stricken by nature. don’t get me wrong, i’m not a hopelessly bored person. i still love science. it’s just that sometimes i wonder if i’d appreciate it more if i saw it from the point of view of a museum exhibit rather than an indepth mathematical study.
ya know what i mean??
(there is a chance that i’m fundamentally an aimless individual. shit - i still wonder if i should have gone into journalism; perhaps those of you who read this thing would like to back up my decision not to pursue writing professionally?).
so in a great juxtoposition of study, i am turning my gaze around from the cosmic microwave background to the microcosm. from the evolution of the universe to the evolution of life. as a meaningless speck living in a universe bounded only by my clothing, perhaps i will find inspiration in the science that defines my person. and from there, back to stardust i will return.
speaking of a universe bounded by my clothing, i think i may have just found an avenue for a spiritual argument for nudism. perhaps i’ll come back to that later. at the moment i think i’m going to get back to that genetic stuff. i’ve done MCMC simulations to model the mechanics of polymer filaments. i would like to learn how to use similar simulations to model the thermodynamic evolution of RNA. this is pretty exciting. in my previous models i was looking at one filament and trying to figure out what it did in a medium. but the evolution problem is all about understanding genetic relationships between all species on earth. frankly, this makes me more than a little moist. this study will be crucial in answering questions like, “War, what is it good for?”, “Dog: Man’s Best Kin or Best Served On A Sesame Seed Bun?”, and, “Is George W. Bush: an Alien From Outer Space or Merely an Average Texan?”
whatever. it’s all random.
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