It is Friday night and I feel awful. This happens more frequently than I’d care to admit.

You might ask me: “You study the cosmos. Doesn’t that make you feel insignificant?”
And I reply, in my probably naive, grasping-for-something-more way: “I feel a drive to be connected with the Universe. By learning about everything knowable, I gain a closeness to the distant, and I become intimate with infinity itself.”
But in truth, when I step back and look at myself, the things that truly make me feel insignificant are the connections I see between people — and how they’re often absent from my life.

Is this loneliness? Is it simple sexual frustration? Is it because I’m afraid to reach out to others? Is it due to a general disillusionment of the motives and mannerisms of my peers? In my hurry to grow up, have I left something within myself unaddressed?

I feel contempt. I feel resentment. Boy, do I feel resentment. Towards a lot of things. I resent having poor, not-well-educated parents, especially when attending a school filled with descendants of wealthy intellectuals. I resent the unstable home life I had to experience throughout my teenage years, and I resent the psychological scarring it leaves with me even once I’m freed of that situation. I resent the sophisticated pre-college educations that my classmates received, when I had to put up with largely mediocre teaching and a brainless mass of “peers”. I resent the fact that I once believed myself to be especially intelligent, only to have that belief crushed out of me last year. Maybe what I resent most of all is the fact that I still feel all this resentment.

Perhaps I don’t deserve the poetic words I said of myself. To “become intimate with infinity itself” — is that really what drives me? I think my greatest fear is that, in truth, I’m only driven by the hope of escaping from my negative emotions.

But… at least there’s hope, isn’t there?

Last night I ate dinner with an astrophysicist (and Duncan and a cool senior). It was a very, ah, mind-expanding experience. This astrophysicist fellow works with dark matter detection experiments and is, as far as I can tell, extremely intelligent. He talked about these crazy things called “twistors” and other awesome stuff. It seems that in many of the better formulations of physical laws, space and time are emergent phenomena of something more fundamental. Which makes me feel really weird when I think about it — since space and time are pretty important to me as a biological entity. It’s a strange thought: All that I am and will ever be is contained in a mass of breathing, feeling flesh, but it’s somehow not really what it seems to be. Well, I suppose this is what happens when paradigm shifts happen; damn smart men have come before me and laughed at the idea of the atom.

I’m trying out this experiment where I get a lot more sleep than usual. It is making me feel better about life most of the time (I am much, much more coherent, speech-wise, when I’m well-rested) but it has the unintended side-effect of not leaving me much time for homework. I’m running into a self-limiting situation.

Also: We’re logging our sleep hours in a google spreadsheet. Some awesome plots are coming your way, after we collect some weeks’ worth of data.

Here’s a silly video to wrap things up:

Hey guys.  My birthday was this weekend, but thanks to great roommates and the band, it sort of lasted the entire 3.5 day weekend.  I had a good time on the noisy [read: something else] bus on the way up, and there was a really fun party once I got to Cornell.  Actually, part of it was really confusing.  This one guy in the Cornell band wanted me to play this game called “lumberjack”, a mercy game.  It wasn’t going so well, because he really wanted to hit me hard, and I didn’t have much feeling in my hands, so the game wasn’t going anywhere until they wanted to get a bunch of Harvard bandies to play this game called “Three Man”.  Here are the rules:

http://www.webtender.com/handbook/games/threeman.game

I’m pretty sure they were making these rules up to screw with us.  Also, they didn’t tell us the rules ahead of time, they just yelled at us when we didn’t know them.

Anyway, on a more wholesome note, when I arrived back home on Saturday night at 10:30, the rest of the blandfill greeted me with a Razmatazz birthday cake from Finale, and we ate it while watching an episode of Firefly and the newest episode of the Office.  I think the most exciting part of the weekend was last night, when we all went out to an Ethiopian restaurant, called Adis Red Sea.  It was fantastic; Tom found it over the summer from the Unofficial Guide to Harvard (who knew it was useful?).  They didn’t really have plates, in the traditional sense; the food was placed on pieces of bread that could be used to eat the food in lieu of utensils.  It was also surprisingly filling, considering the food seemed to be all contained in bowls the same size as small cereal bowls.  I’m a bad food writer, clearly, considering that’s all I can think of writing.

Right now we’re waiting for Tom to come back so that we can eat the birthday cake my mom ordered for me while we watch the next episode of Firefly.  Life is good.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1169#comic