nawl

I went grocery shopping on Tuesday, but I'm only cooking my first real meal tonight. Corn soup, of course. (The marinated grilled asparagus and portabellos at the barbecue last night don't count. Lemon juice, soy sauce, garlic, cilantro. Did you know that the cilantro sold in Whole Foods actually smells like cilantro, unlike the "coriander" sold in the Asian store in Budapest? I thought not.)

I bought the cheapest big cooking knife at Target. I haven't used a knife this sharp in years. Such a revelation. I bought celery from Save n Pack or whatever the name of the supermarket was. It cost $1.69. It's enormous! I opened up the can of corn for the soup (yeah, it's summer, I should really be using fresh) and it was sweet and crunchy and wonderful.

Consumer products are so talkative here. I bought a ladle. It didn't cost that much. It tells me "SoftWorks(tm) products are designed with your comfort in mind. Each item has a soft handle that nestles perfectly in the palm of your hand. You won't want to put them down." I bought some ground coriander, and it tells me "The hot climate of Morocco produces our fine coriander; it's the seed of the cilantro plant, but very different in flavor. The slightly fruity fragrance and nutty taste of this delicate spice contribute to a diversity of foods, including pickles, soups, desserts, and many Indian dishes."

I went rock climbing today with my mentor. He's very good. My forearms are sore.

I suppose I finally have a sort of rhythm here, which means it's time to start breaking it. I spend all day every day inside buildings (work and home) with overactive air conditioning and non-opening windows. The commute is an hour each way in the hired cars that AT&T provides to take us between Rutgers and Florham Park, also a small enclosed space with overactive air conditioning and non-opening windows. I haven't moved in days, outside of walking between air-conditioned building and car. I wake up at 6:30 am and get home after 7 pm after a combination of roomate alarm-clock schedules and commute times, which leaves just enough time to do one thing (nap, go grocery shopping, go rock climbing) before dropping off to sleep. I'm beginning to understand why the real world turns people into zombies who think that buying a big car is important.

So I've sacrificed vitality for intellectual stimulation. I don't know if I'll get any real work done this summer, where "real work" means "publishable results", but I'm sure learning a lot. Every day I get an hour or two of personal lecture on something or other, lattices, modular forms, p-adics, sphere packing, and more books to stack on my desk and start working through on my own.

This math thing is like a bad habit. I feel like at some point I really ought to stop playing around, and focus on something that'll get me a job, or write me a PhD thesis, or whatever, because I'm really not good enough at math to be serious about it. But then again, did you know that every triangle is isoceles under the topology of the p-adics? And we were stacking pennies and balls today to show how to make a sphere packing in n+1 dimensions out of a packing in n dimensions, which may or may not be a lattice.

Perhaps I can still justify it. Wikipedia points out that two's complement is like a truncated p-adic representation. In CS classes, they present two's complement as if it were something cool that just fell out of thin air. But no, it's actually quite natural if you start pushing your notions of power series. I wish they would mention that sort of thing more often. Perhaps it would have taken me less time to get here.

So much to learn.