When I grow up....

Where to begin? It's been quite a day, though I suppose that my sleeping hours are now very much shifted, to the ridiculous 6am to about 3pm, which is plenty of sleep, yes, but not very nice for dealing with other people.

Last night a great, long phone conversation with my usual mutterances and mumblings, that deepening and growlying of my voice that comes with late darkness, so much so that I was incomprehensible enough to have my stated one-time ambition to be "a math professor when I grow up" mistaken for "a masturbator when I grow up." Further examination does perhaps suggest that the similarity is not completely outlandish, but still... It's a little embarassing, at the least. But such mishearing aside, I feel as if my head was cleared in many ways, that I was able to somehow step back and look at the shape of my life, with some greater context provided by counterfactuals: with the question put to me, I guess I see at least five tracks for myself within the next decade: (1) pure teaching, which seems unlikely and rather unsatisfying, though stable and easy; (2) a route that takes me through administration, where it might feel as if I might have more of a push policy-wise, and where I might shape schools and not just classrooms; (3) a more purely academic route, where I go back to school for a parent-pleasing terminal degree in some non-math field, such as linguistic, philosophy, or maybe even economics; (4) a law-school/political route, where I get the credentials to push the system from the outside, lawsuits and such; (5) a more purely artistic route, where I try to comick full-time.

Of course, these are all somehow external measures: somehow what really matters would be an adopted family of Chinese-yakking, chopsticks-clacking black kids.

Here's to batteries dying before the conversation does, Kean.


Meanwhile, I suppose I am neck-deep in modal logic. This is vaguely fun, and nicely between philosophy and logic--it's nice to get back into the old groove as far as math goes, though we'll see how long this lasts. There is no greater motivator than independent study in a classroom where people confuse odds for primes and don't understand simple syntax in quantificational logic. (For example, a predicate cannot take an existential quantifier as an argument....). Who knows where this will lead, in the hunt for adequate recommendations for law school... ugh.