ai yai yai

signs that we're all too stressed

last night: leigh and i are happily playing pool at eric's house and quizzing each other on math theorems for the qual (e.g. "what does arzela-ascoli say?... 12 ball in the corner pocket"..."if a sequence of functions is pointwise bounded and equicontinuous then it contains a subsequence that converges uniformly on compact sets... 7 in the side pocket", etc.)

(the previous night, eric, in an effort to make me a little better kept putting balls right on the edge of a corner pocket and setting me up with the cue ball clear across the table... for about 2 dozen shots in a row, i got the balls in without scratching and eric was amazed that i did so since i'm realy not that good)

eric comes down the stairs to join our review/watch our game, and i scratch on a shot identical to what he was setting up the previous night

eric, "see, you can't just hit the balls so hard... hitting a pool ball on the edge of a pocket is like holding a baby chicken, you gotta do it gently"

me "you hold a baby chicken gently too long and it craps on you"

eric "oh man, so then you manhandle them so that they pee on you?"

me "birds just have one kind of crap that come out of them, not two"

eric, "only you would know that"

me "me, biologists, and people who have grown up on farm type places worldwide"

eric, "ok, so here's something i've *always* wondered... how the heck do birds have sex... i just don't understand"

me, "are you serious?"

eric, "yes, i really wonder this and i don't know how it works"

me, "i can't believe you've *never* seen birds have sex... one gets on top of the other and it's pretty straightforward from there... not too weird of a concept... why are we talking about this?"

eric, "i've only owned two birds and not concurently, so i've never seen such a thing"

me, "all the more reason to visit my family in memphis... you can watch birds have sex... aren't you excited now?"

.................

as if that wasn't weird enough... somehow, *that* conversation degenerated into a debate about why eric thinks bird shows (which i've grown up going to with my dad since before i can remember) are completely ridiculous while i tried to defend the idea... eric thinks its ridiculous that there are standards for how different chicken breeds, cow breeds, dogs, cats, etc. should look and that the world would be just as great if we let everything procreate at will and form one convergent mutt chicken, mutt cow, mutt dog, mutt cat, etc., while i defended my dad's case... we snapped back and forth for over an hour about this before colleen, leigh, and i went home

(and on the way home i called dad to ask if he had a good justification besides aesthetics for breed standards... his answer? productivity... the predominant traits preserved by the breed standards are there to help optimize meat and dairy production, because if it wasn't for farmers we wouldn't be able to feed the world)

one more day til the qual... i don't think any of our nerves could handle much more of the snappiness we're all at right now

hopefully i'm still a grad student in 2.5 days....