So today was a reunion with two math buddies from math camp, whom I met maybe 11 years ago, and ten years ago we were just young junior counselors in the worst summer in recent memory at said camp.

Anyway, it’s odd to consider how far fallen I am from the designated trajectory, which would require me to be some sort of postdoc or assistant professor of mathematics somewhere after a suitably challenging undergrad and an ivy league PhD. Still, I suppose I don’t have any real regrets and am glad at how much we’ve all seemingly mellowed out in terms of personality, politics, and philosophy. I guess I don’t have any real regrets at abandoning the mathematics, even if my current trajectory isn’t exactly reaping great rewards quite yet. Still, I do miss a little the singleminded devotion that it took to really understand some mathematics, as it’s been over a year since I’ve genuinely struggled with any mathematics. That, at least, is what I should try and do, but as with many things, the hard part is nailing your ZPD.

So I don’t know what to make of my kids–the honeymoon is over and they’re all draggy about learning the math alongside the problem solving I’m supposed to be teaching them, and there’s in general very little patience in terms of trying to solve prolems with more than one-step formulas once they are given a new kind of formula. It’s tricky, yes, but it’s the time span more than anything else that’s limited.

Other than that, the weather has been nearly unbearable. I wish it were fall already.

Besides that, it’s just this new routine with the prospect of more hourly wage labor, which I don’t want to say no to straight off because you know, it’s all about the networking.

So three pilsners (urquell if lukewarm) with Rob are just about enough to cure what it was that was ailing me. Which is not to say that I wasn’t a little moonish earlier, but after a late-night session discussing crossword puzzles for mathematics learning with graduate students, a little levity is quite overdue.

Pendant lamps, meanwhile, are quite overdue to alleviate Mark’s persistent complaints re: the want of a overhead lighting in my apartment’s living room. That and a recentering of the new TV. Meanwhile, the flypapers have yet to fully exterminate the gnats.

I should really do better to reread Monkey or rather Journey to the West, Waley notwithstanding.

It remains to be seen if I can meet Rob for a paella lunch tomorrow.

So here is my life after 5 today.

Ran downtown for my presentation. A/V problems like mad. Mac Minis are cute and wireless keyboards are hot, but the lack of hotkeys renders GSP almost stupid.

Did some adlibbing, made some jokes about cravats and the Siamese. Rob and Laser were mostly appreciative of my jokes, which were hedges against something or another.

Several choice moments include the following jokes: (I did not tell any jokes about what’s green and really far away? What’s really far away and hard to wash off?) A teacher complains her kids can’t even draw parallel lines and I’m like, “What, their rulers have only one side?” “Why did the parabola go to the guidance counselor?” “Because she lacks direction!”

I’m told the best joke I told was about how the vanishing point moves whenever you turn around. This joke cannot be transcribed.

We didn’t make jokes about urban kids are already familiar with traintracks, thankfully.

Some pints later, I try to stagger Midtownward for Mark, sadly leaving Rob in the lurch and Laser a bit confused, but somehow got lost by heading into Battery Park City, but the ruins of the WTC made me further and further away from the subway, so I took a cab (thank goodness for ExpressPay) to near the dojo, whereupon then I hopped on the train to Mark.

It was good seeing Mark. It was great seeing Mark. It was necessary and overdue seeing Mark. I’ve missed him unreasonably. Tonight was reasonably light and relaxed and just catching up, shooting the breeze, and flirty, retracing our first date steps somewhat on this our tenth, talking about the headlong, heady pace and how much we can see a future together, as much as we are leaving our own lives intact as possible (just don’t ask me how many times I’ve skipped practice in the past few weeks). It’s almost enough to make me revive that old song, “When My Boy Walks Down the Street,” but that was another country… And this time it’s somehow much more reciprocated, nourishing, and sustaining and there is longing which is not based on what is not but what we don’t have right now because of work, life, family, and such. Happily in love.

So of course there is little to say–I am now revisiting Lone Wolf & Cub, which makes me all emotional, like, with its simplicity and its rawness and its fluid violence, its authenticity–I was also getting pissed off at the new Nation as I was on the subway (mostly for what was going on within it). And on the way home, there was this cute little black boy, who couldn’t have been more than 2, but was already talking and gesturing and everything. Sigh. I must be PMSin’, the tears really do well up sometimes. Ugh. Not enough time to change the world. Maybe it’s arrogant to think people want saving, but I dunno… I guess it’s just making their lives as easy as mine were, back in the day.

Ah, well. Alric does not have good news on the dating front. But I am working on that. I feel as if he and Juliana could get along rather well, actually. I was woken this morning by a call from D, who’s a sweetie, who sends me these postcards with naked women, which I place on the fridge next to the postcards of naked men that my older friends who know me send me, who is still trying to help me out with girls. But yeah. Juliana and Alric? Stranger things have happened. But apparently chicks dig my politics.

I really need to skip more math classes. Induction is a great thing, like the first three times you learn it. You really don’t need to see it more often than that. I’m just a snob. But it is an amusing proof that all collections of n horses are the same color. Hrmm… And there is a philosophical thrust to it all, which is that in the case that any group of 2 horses are the same color, then… But I dunno.

In the modal logic, I am happy to report that I am reaching philosophically meaty stuff as far as existence goes. My sort of kneejerk admiration for Quine’s sort of deflationism is being deflated. This is actually meaningful philosophical substance with actual logic to go along with it. There might be a paper in here someplace.

Making plans with Joephet for tomorrow and the weekend somehow makes me very happy. Like I have something to actually look forward to. And yes: I am evidently going shopping with him this weekend, which I suppose we will hafta try and document in some way, as those who know me will find this rather difficult to believe. I am a very cheap dresser. Cheaper than any you could find at IKEA.

So my throat still hurts, but less so, after some chicken from the Chinese place, which was embarassing, as the entire family was sitting down chatting about their next meal of dog in the dining area when I walked in, and so they hurriedly rose to serve me, which was a bit strange, to say the least, and these excellent vitamin C drops that Halls makes which have made it possible for me to swallow without my entire torso performing the peristalsis, though the pain is still a little nagging.

I really do need to get into college early if I ever hope to make any headway on this math–there are some things I need to look up and some novels I need to check out, and the new Nation should hold me over just fine until I get to the library and new material: but so far it is a blank sort of day, having lost the push to produce comics, my letters stand there, languid, accomplishing nothing. And my summer dribbles away.

I really should try and write a comprehensive manifesto as regards math education as directed toward the aim of democracy. Yes. That would be nice. But maybe I should read a bit more before going off.

So the Post is still a goldmine. Today, re: the gay high school thing, a 35-year-old sheet-metal worker from Westchester is heard to remark, “There’s enough segregation in society as it is. What are they going to have next black and white school? It’s ridiculous.” I guess that’s all I need to say…

I’m skipping classes today. It’s not a big deal, though, as all my work is done, yet again. I really should find some fun project in Assembly to do in my spare time, except I don’t actually have an assembler at home and hafta schlep an hour and a half to assemble my code. So I should find something fun to do, though I’m tempted to just do some more math, strangely enough: looking up all manner of old work, and hankering to do some writing again.

I’d made great progress on this one short story And there is hope quite some time ago, but I have made little progress since and it’s not yet clear that my protagonist is a chinaboi. Hrmm….

So I am sitting at my college computer lab, blogging and surfing away since my Assembly class was cancelled. But this is pleasant enough, even if I am deprived of my usual chatty subactivities. I have finished my assignment for the week, which seems horribly simple after a fashion, and I am wondering whether that $40 Assembly book was worth it. I also feel snobbery creeping into what I am thinking, as I am looking up nursing programs… I don’t know what to say at this point.

I was rereading some more unpleasant writing I’d done as regards Joephet some weeks ago: three weeks ago, in fact. And I must say, I am rather sharp. Maybe I will post that when I get home, maybe not.

So upon reading Harper’s for the first time in some time, I confess I find it horribly horribly pretentious. It has the post-visceral taint of well-fed white liberalism, if that makes sense. The extended essay on dissent is more rambling than a drunken me. Maybe I am allergic to higher-quality paper, or the pooh-poohness of it all: this is simply not muscular prose, it is too upholstered in a florid print. I guess it’s also already long-obvious the things pointed out: the similarities between the present American imperialism and that of a century ago. So maybe I’m jaded: I guess I’m curious as to what the demographic for this magazine is, as well as what the further-left reception is (not great, I’d imagine). To think that I’d once wanted to work for these guys…

Ah, yes: the Post, which I read as my daily dose of right-wing nonsense, and also for signs of cracks in the Bush edifice, which is actually happening blessedly more and more often, today has a second headline of “Gay High,” which is apparently just good ol’ Harvey Milk given a head. Hrmm… I guess it would be nice to be able to bring Joephet to school, but at the same time, I feel as if I am ill-equipped to deal with quite so much high school bujiiness. Still, one must give some thought to the Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long’s query, “Is there a different way to teach homosexuals? Is there gay math?”

Well, I can say from personal experience that in gay math, combinatorics (how many outfits?) is much more important. And your word problems tend to be set at Sephora. But that is an inside joke. And I am a terribly dressed gay math teacher, hehe, so I was famous for the (illustrative) question, “Mr. Hu has five dress shirts and one pair of pants. How many outfits does he have?” It’s great to be able to deflect your students’ accusations of buggery with a simple, “Not with these shoes…”

So I been lazy on this day my day off, which as expected has become this deep sink where there is to be no real math to be done, though I am somehow reading yet more short fiction, with the hope that perhaps some of it will rub off and I will gain the sort of fluency I will need to make some of my own. Not so much a matter of imitative strokes, but more the direction of orienting myself, as it were, as this is not something I’ve given much thought to. It’s also difficult, because old Alric, for all his ambitions in fictional directions (heehee: I’m going to have to blog that little one-liner), confesses not to often read women authors. Which seems rather important if I am to write biting SAPI fiction (At Alric’s suggestion, “Straight Asian/Pacific Islander” is more clear-cut, with the requisite counterpart “GAPI”).

See, I’ve been trying to blog about class-assumptions in fiction for some time now, but in all my attempts come across as something of a prig. But it’s a big deal, still. Like at the year-end reception for the teachers at my school at the Brooklyn Marriott, where some teachers were unable to identify all the cheeses present–Cheddar, Havarti, Brie. I mean, brie, goddammit! This is not rocket science. So the point is that any work of fiction–any type of discourse, really–has class-assumptions about it which can be difficult to somehow overcome–and this is the hesitancy that I feel, though of course it’s deeper than this one trivial manifestation–I just don’t quite know how to verbalize it yet. But I feel this way about most art, which is, I realize, somehow foolish, but perhaps no more foolish than some soaring praise of the universality of art and beauty and all that. I guess I recognize the barriers but have yet to rest upon their ultimate significance. And it’s not as if I don’t love a good Waugh story.

So I met this new guy today. This is not something I normally do on the subway, but I guess he saw what I was reading, and I guess I also saw what he was reading, so it was perhaps inevitable. So we strike up a conversation, and hit it off admirably. All the while, I’m thinking: I’m not that obvious, am I? Well, I guess today I was. In any case, it’s sort of a shame that he has to get off so soon, as today we just weren’t getting off at the same stop. We didn’t have time to finish, and all the while I think our trainmates were rather amused or perturbed by his wild gesticulations and floorbound demonstrations. There’s a reason why I don’t like this sort of thing in public… In any case, we exchanged numbers (well, I gave him my email: never phone number to strangers, after all), so we can probably finish up later. Altogether unexpected, but still…

I just really hafta stop reading math on the train.

Hrmm… I am soon compiling all of the writings on a particular bathroom wall that I have been reading and rereading. Apparently, the appropriate response to, “I love all of my girlfriends shoes… [followed by a detailed inventory of shoes as well as acts]” is “Well, I love my girlfriend’s titties and pussy…” Also, while “dictator” is a word, and “pussytator” is not, this is a disconnected fact, somehow. Sigh. A teacher’s instincts never die.

Modal logic is exciting. Correspondence theory! Cayley-Klein geometries and modal logics! Whee!

Orientalism is treating me well. (This is a use-mention error, to comic effect). And I will soon begin work on my tapestry of stories starring pathetic, emasculated Chinabois.

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.

First day of classes for the summer, BS CS to plug in for inadequate math, 3 hours of train for 4 hours of boredom. But not hopeless. I mean, how exciting can Assembly possibly be? It’s droll, though, how the instructor thinks that “mnemonic” (pronounced “menumonic,” evidently) comes from the Latin for “operation.” The other class is sadly hopeless in its own way, just overblown philosophical asides in what is so far an intro-Logic class. I haven’t heard “vague” abused so many times in a class ever. But the instructor seems willing to work with me on modal logic and other little bits, more from the logic side than the philosophy side of things, which will be novel. Not that this is worth much to my political mission.

Meanwhile, I might well become more involved with the Math Immersion program, in terms of helping with tutoring and perhaps trying to rationalize the Algebra course, to make it more useful for teachers at the secondary level. So it’s been exciting getting back into the saddle mathematically, though at this point I bet that I just need some sort of intellectual stimulation after these last two weeks fallow.