Thursday, December 14, 2017

No More Lyrebirds (or some equally irrelevant title)

It's never over. Not in an absolute sense. Well, depending on what "over" means. Like, eventually there's not going to be any lack-of-entropy left to do things with. So things will be over in that sense. There will still be time-asymmetric phenomena, as I learned today watching this video, but like, those won't happen everywhere. It's kinda strange to think about, that time could be either a local or emergent phenomenon. It's like how the best definition of dimension I've seen makes it a local property of a specific point.

What I'm trying to get at is that I'm not done with finals yet, and even after I'm done with finals I'll have more to do. That's how life works. Not sure why I decided to start with that. Well, no going back now. It's not like I can erase what I've done and start over. That would be ridiculous.

I'm done with most of my classes now. The half-credit Patnam seminar ended quietly enough, with me sleeping through the first half of the Putnam. [I am informed that I am waking up in nine hours. That is false.] Then there was a quasi-party in which I played Werewolf and was the Private Investigator for four out of four games. Le sigh.

The half-credit Bio lab is also done. Biology of Terrestrial Arthropods, indeed. I am now super hyped and at the same time very intimidated by my impending quest to write about every family of every animal. There's a lot out there. But not an insurmountable lot. In other news, I worked for 18 hours straight and until 6:00 in the morning to finish the project for the bio lab. I've done the math, and I got at most a B. Welp. I did my best.

The full-credit freshman seminar (Cosmology in Literature) came to a nice exciting end. The last reading was "Tlön, Ukbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges, and it was a doozy. More than half of the class had not realized that the outer-text was just as false as the inner-text. It was incredibly entertaining to watch their brains explode. Then it was revealed that one of the folks mentioned in "Tlön..." was in real life the person who funded the library that became the foundation for Yale. So, in some ways, and to a lot of people, Yale is Tlön. That freaked us all out. I'm still not even sure if it's true. I proceeded to write my final essay about my second-favorite cosmogony: the reality-as-narrative themes in the work of Borges. It was good.

So yeah. Those are the endings that have happened so far. Been so busy these past weeks that I didn't even remember to call up my reps to not repeal net neutrality. Whoopsie daisies. This might be trouble. But hey, it's not over yet. I have breathing room now. I'll try my best. For now though I should get to sleep.

P.S.: One more thing. I've done it! Double triple digits!