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.

Last night another drunkenly beautiful carouse at the Beer Garden around the corner from my house, the stagger home always the most brilliant stretch in all Astoria, vaguely residentio-commercial, but in a non-threatening way, with the TriBoro bridge always suddenly looming, luminous in the distance. This time with Bessie–that frankness sipped by sipped, and after a day of hanging out, toying more and more with the possibility of going to law school as being a more effective way of reaching strangers, more effective than this current teaching business, which reaches only no-longer-strangers, but can’t yet shover the system further where it needs to go–after a year, I’m still idealistic (though, as the old phrase goes, “certainly not wide-eyed”), but it’s unclear how long that can last in the face of unsympathetic changes to the system and an economy that’s less and less friendly (more an issue for my students than for me, me with my iron-rice-bowl, as the phrase goes). The only issue is a matter of usefulness–I feel useful now, but to wait three years after the two I plan to spend still teaching before being greatly more useful is a strange thing. But I won’t be covering any rich ass… Too early to tell, I’m probably just heady on the enthusiasm Bessie always brings, and vaguely dissatisfied with my current idleness. I guess I’ve been thinking back to that time I went and helped my brother out with his legal-type troubles with the school administration. It was then, more than ever, that I somehow felt indispensable, and as if I was actually bringing to bear all the math, philosophy, and prose that had, until then, merely been disconnected elements. And we kicked some major whitey ass. That was just a defensive action, though. Time to get more offensive…

Speaking of offensive, though my Spanish spelling is poor, I am often reminded of the idiom, “fumando como un chino en kiebra,” which means, roughly, “smoking like a bankrupt chinaman.” That’s me.