It's one of those nights

Where I am up too late and I drank too much, and I'm listening to Iron and Wine and googling Latigo Flint (Where are you Latigo, where are you? You belong in that box with all the things I left behind a year ago, when I was on the top of my game and I knew what I was, before it fell apart and I lost track of it, before I lost that part of myself that I had fallen in love with, before I fell out of love with myself, you belong to that part)

INCOMING MESSAGE

At the beach weather is beautiful STOP

Will sit in the sand and play Sudoku STOP

and drink margaritas until I can't see straight STOP

Please direct all questions in my absence STOP

To my cellphone or email inbox END TRANSMISSION

A hello and then some

Well.

So its been awhile and everyone who ever looked at this space has surely stopped checking it by now. But what can I do about that? It has not been a good year for me. As of the time of this posting, I am a 22-year-old college graduate with a BS in mathematics and absolutely no idea what to do with it.

The problems started in the fall. I shouldn't have taken 17 hours but I was wanting to graduate and then I... well. I had only one class within my major and I didn't do so hot in it. We'll leave it at that. So that was kind of nerve-wracking. In order to graduate I still needed 21 hours, so spring semester was quite possibly the worst four months of my life. It started out alright, of course. I was taking three math courses so I felt pretty good about it, like I was finally going to get to do something I enjoyed.

Well, I don't know.

I started out kind of rough in one of the classes...but that was alright and I recovered and was doing okay for awhile. But then I got sick for about a week and a half, and I lost track of it sometime in early March I think. Suddenly I started dropping behind, and I wasn't sleeping, even more so than usual... it's not that I wasn't tired but there simply wasn't time for it... I started skipping meals without realizing it, or skipping lunch because it meant I could take a twenty minute nap in the middle of the day. It went on like this and then after a couple of weeks things really turned to shit.

The last three weeks were awful. So awful. Anytime I was asked about my plans for after graduation it would be all I could do not to burst into tears, because everything I had ever wanted and worked for suddenly loomed in front of me and I did not want it, not anymore, not at all. Everything I had ever loved about math and logic and rigor had bled from my psyche; it wasn't fun anymore, it wasn't rewarding anymore-- it was just exhausting and frustrating and depressing and so terrible, just so terrible. It was a physical pain to go to class and sit and be bewildered for an hour... and though I know I was about on the same level as everyone else it just felt like I was completely inadequate at anything and everything... I would second guess myself on the homework; skip problems, turn nothing in... Every day was an exercise in misery, in personal failure, in incomprehensible dread... I hadn't heard back from the two grad schools I had applied to, and I finally got the nerve to talk to Wake Forest about my application they told me they had never received the majority of my information.

My immediate reaction to this news was probably not the sanest five minutes of my life. I settled down eventually and it's a good thing too, because when the initial shock wore off what I felt was, surprisingly, a sick, knee-weakening sense of relief.
Suddenly the doors opened, and I realized: I don't have to go to grad school. I emailed App State and told them I had decided not to go in the fall. My application was still partially incomplete anyway.

I don't know, it's been a hard run for me these last few months. I didn't think I would make it. I still don't know how I did. I think my professors were too nice to me; I don't think I deserved it. But someone did, apparently. I survived. And I graduated with a B average, which is completely mysterious to me.

I've always felt that my output at school was never a complete representation of my abilities and I still feel that... It is more a representation of the potential I've always let fall through the cracks due to my recurrent insomnia, general anxiety, and even basic apathy, sometimes. I'll admit, there were times that last semester when faced with completing in my first set of homework in over a week or sleeping for three hours, I'd choose the sleep. When it comes down to it I was really rather a terrible student: problems with attendance, general laziness, the usual half-assery... For me its always been easy to do the bare minimum and still make pretty decent grades-- and I don't think I've ever grown out of that. And that combined with the serious overload I had my senior year.... well... A more dedicated student could have pulled it off. But not me. Toward the end there I got seriously, dangerously depressed-- and I'm lucky that all it made me do was sleep badly and never eat and cry a lot.

In the end, I think I just got overwhelmed... and I think with the opportunity to miss it I'll eventually go back-- I'm sure that if I give myself some time to do something else, maybe to pursue a new line of interest -- I'm absolutely sure that I will miss it dearly. That sort of method of thought is kind of buried inside me, a constant hunger, a longing running through my blood; I know I will miss it, I know I will want to go back.

But right now I have to concentrate on regaining the will to live.

Pothead Pictures

I finally found my camera (it was under the recliner) so I was able to take some pictures of the fruits of my labor in Hand-Building Clay

Here are the infamous pinch pots... as you can see, some are better than others... practice makes slightly less lopsided, I guess.

The white/gray ones are stoneware, the brown ones terracotta.









Here are some press-molded plates I made, I have to make a few more before tommorrow. I wasn't supposed to make a stoneware plate but I did anyway just because.


Here is a slab of terracotta that needs to be made into a slab construction before tommorrow if I have any desire to make a good grade... unfortunately it is not yet leather hard and thus will not hold its shape...


Here is some stupid recycled terracotta that I left out all weekend but is still not firm enough to flatten out... you can see where the wood is sucking out all the excess moisture...


And finally, they say that art tends to resemble its creator... what do you guys think?

OH NOES

STEVE IRWIN IS DEAD

HE'S WRESTLIN CROCODILES IN HEAVEN NOW

*SOB*

The Potter

I know I will spend several years
As I attempt to close the void
there opened by the one I love.
I will sculpt the edge of that heartache
like a master at the wheel
Until with perfect symmetry
And quiet absolution
I will create a mouth so small
and temper the solution
So that,
When some time has passed,
And the heart-bled wine
Has aged at last,
I will take it on the tongue of memory
In the tiniest of tastes.
Overcome by bittersweetness,
I will look back with but a hint of tart
And find it without waste.

On Pluto

Ok here's the deal.

I have had no less than fifteen people ask me my opinion on the Pluto thing and I know I'm the resident science nerd but honestly people, I don't want to repeat myself anymore, so PLEASE STOP ASKING ME WHETHER OR NOT I THINK PLUTO SHOULD BE DEFINED AS A PLANET.

I am not an astronomer and I don't pretend to know what's the best method of classification. The International Astronomical Union did not go with the definition I thought they would, but that's fine with me. I know we all grew up under the definition that qualified Pluto as a planet, but after the discovery of 2003 UB313, the only choices were to have more or less planets than the traditional nine.

If they had gone with the definition that allowed for Pluto to remain a planet, then at least fifty discovered objects in our solar system would have qualified for that position, and this doesn't include those objects which have not been discovered but almost assuredly exist unseen in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. And my god, my mom's third grade students can't even spell some of their names right, let alone remember the names of fifty planets (My Very Elegant Mother Just Sometimes Understands Networking Problems, But Anyway As I Was Saying Maybe We Could Go Grab A Bite to Eat And Get Some Elephants Some Peanuts Even Though They Are Allergic And Then We Could...etc). As a matter of fact, defining Pluto as a planet is rather like taking a single candy from an entire package of M&M's and calling it chocolate bar, simply because it was the first one you grabbed.

And really, this sort of holding on to Pluto is a bit like clutching a pacifier beyond a reasonable age; we must wean ourselves from old paradigms as we discover new ones, or we'll never move forward at all. The most simple system is almost always invariably the best, and if we adjusted the definition of a planet to include Pluto but exclude other objects of that type then all we've done is overcomplicate the system in the method of Ptolemy, adding epicycles and deferents until the geocentric model can fit that which is observed. If Copernicus's heliocentric model had never been accepted for feelings of some sort of whimsical nostalgia then where would astronomy be today?

If the IAU feels that Pluto should not be qualified as a planet, the from the point of view of someone who not only encourages but rejoices in the progression of scientific thought, I think their reasons are perfectly acceptable.