2 freakin 15 am :-P

oh joy oh joy -- i haven't had this issue in awhile.... you probably haven't heard me talk about starbucks in a long time even though for years lara and starbucks have been synonymous... that's because since christmas amongst other things i've made a concerted effort to eliminate caffeine from my drinks... i went from coffee to tea (if you pick right you only get 60% of the caffeine in a mug of tea as you do in a mug of coffee), then to decaf tea, and then to water. being as i mostly drink water, and occasionally decaf tea anymore, and that's about it, there's no caffeine keeping me up late at night... until now...

ben's cousin michelle (aka misha) is considering grad school in NYC and stayed in town long enough to hang out with ben this weekend... ben and i were chatting this afternoon and he invited me to dinner with them... but first misha was dying for some coffee and really wanted starbucks as a prelude to dinner... so around 8pm going based on taste, i got a granda valenia white mocha (this includes 2 shots of espresso)... the halflife of caffeine is 6 hours, so that means here at 2am i've still got half a grand white mocha in my system, and being as i haven't had this much caffeine at once in MONTHS, i can't just make myself go to sleep... ooops....shoulda considered this 6 hours ago :-P

that's probably not the only reason i've been up... i've been thinking a lot lately about random stuff (well i'm generally always thinking about random stuff... can't help it)...

here's a sampling...
*eric's had some really random but good questions lately.... he ate dinner with me on wednesday night and commented that he finds it disturbing that for two people who are both decently well-read and think a lot about things that we have such fundamentally different views of the universe, at least on the theology side of things. he comments a lot about "well, say we both had grown up on pluto, no parents influencing us on what to think or how to think when we're little, no society messing with our heads, then i think we would naturally come to similar viewpoints on the world... even if there's differences i think our beliefs would be more convergent than they are now..."...
he wants to discuss a lot about what concepts are "natural", like although he doesn't believe in God, he can see how someone can say that things existing might be reason to believe in a "creator"... then again he comments, knowing enough science, he knows about how "rule 30" is exceedingly complex even though it follows from 8 simple binary operations, so he can see complexity arrising from different specified very simple laws, and doesn't necessarily see the complexity of the world as evidence for something all powerful and bigger tos start it. (see here about rule 30, or ask me if you're curious what the heck it meants)
on the other hand, eric doesn't think morality or the concept of a messiah are very natural. he argues that morality/conscience comes from thinking "well i wouldn't want someone to do this to *me*, so maybe other people don't want me to do it to them", but it's a human construct, and not very well-defined or formalized, since this definition can vary from person to person and so if it can't be axiomatized then it must not be very real.
i think it's natural to say "people murdering other people/stealing from other people/etc. is wrong; there's something fundamentally screwed up about the way people interact in the world", eric thinks that's just how it is, and maybe it doesn't need fixing because maybe that's just the most natural way to survive, by looking out for yourself.
mostly i think it bothers him that you have to get so deep to fundamentals to discuss where we differ... to discuss closer to the surface issues, we get to a point where "well my view on this follows from my belief in God and that He has an absolute sense of justice", while "eric's belief on this stems from...." it disturbs him that two people who have both seen and read a lot can have such widely disparaging fundamental axioms in our respective views of the world.
i find it intriguing, but not quite as distressing (word choice?) as he seems to find it... it's still some really good chats every time we get around to it.

* i've been thinking a lot about people and friendships. i find it interesting how while i've always had guy friends, i've generally had some really close female friends... now, here in jersey, i have female friends, but they're not who i talk to first about serious things. my primary local support system is 3 guys. and ironically the one i talk to the most about things is the one i share the least personal stuff with, and the one i see the least is the one i'm most comfortable sitting down and chatting about relationships and stuff with. i have a different kind of sister-brother relationship with each of them, and i find it humorous (word choice?) that i've gone in the past two years from having a primarily female support system to a primarily male support system.

* i've been thinking a lot about me and math. the further you go in education, the more you realize that there's more and more people than you ever realized who are even smarter than you (unless you're extremely lucky and in the top fraction of a fraction of a percent)... i'm definitely not in that extremely lucky category. i completely lucked out though. i have an advisor who actually invited me to work with him and is extremely affirming of all his students. i NEED that encouragement, since i'm hard enough on myself already, so personality-wise he's a great match for me to work with. however, he's also in an area where the problems are pretty straightforward to state even though they're hard to solve. this means that my reading class with him is already doing minor research, without much background reading. i'm thankful for this because i thoroughly enjoy DOING new math instead of solving old problems, and knowing i liked that from undergrad is one of the main reasons i'm here in a ph.d. program, however not having to study and do as much reading for my work with my advisor i feel a lot like an amateur compared to friends in areas where they've HAD to do a lot of reading first. i do a lot of fun mucking around, but feel like i don't KNOW as much. this summer i need to do a lot of reading for oral quals for the fall, and that should help, but sometimes i question my ability/knowledge-base. i guess that's a perennial problem for most people... in a top tier ph.d. program, we're all in the top less than like 5% of math grad students in the country, and so i guess it's the nature of the beast to all feel pretty insignificant and incompetant from time to time... oi...

* here's something i've been getting excited about: john nash (the mathematician who "a beautiful mind" was about) is coming to speak at experimental math seminar this thursday. since i'm dr. z.'s student, i'm invited to dinner with the speaker afterwards, so this thursday i should be having dinner with john nash... a couple years ago i never would have dreamed of something like that. not that he's the president or anything, but he is a major name person for my field and i'll get to not only meet him in person, but chat with him over indian food. sometimes my life is pretty unexpectedly fun :-)

* i weigh 5 pounds less than i did a week ago -- stress probably had a bit to do with that, but probably so did me having bought a bag of oranges and apples for my snackfood for the week too... that made my day :-P

* eric watched "in america" with me yesterday afternoon. i hadn't seen it since i saw it in the theater 2 years ago. i had forgotten just how good the ending is. it's all about letting go of pain without forgetting the good that comes mixed in with the bad (if you see it, that statement makes more sense). it's one of the best movies i've seen in the past several years. i've been thinking about it.

* i've been thinking about going home and all the stuff i need to get done before then. semester here ends on may 2... it'll be busy in the meantime, but then summer job doesn't start til june 6. haven't seen my family since christmas and then it was for less than a week (unlike eric, colleen, and leigh who each went home for a couple weeks.. i was the last to leave jersey and beat them all back here by a week for the qual),... the extra study time for the qual paid off and made it a respectable pass rather than a hairline pass or a fail that i might have gotten without coming back so soon, but this means in the past year i've seen my parents and brother all for about 2 weeks total... i haven't seen grandma pudwell since last may either. it'll be interesting to see all of the above again. in a good way... just everything changes over time. mom's transitioning from principal to back to the classroom this year, memphis church is in search of a pastor (pastor mike moved to kansas last fall), brother's getting oooold on me and has a girl friend (purposely not one word) he's spent a decent amount of time with for months now,... i guess it's just my observation that when you only get "every 6 month" snapshots of life, being this far away most of the time, it's amazing the changes each trip, no matter how much stays the same...

so in summary: yeah, i've been thinking... about lots of stuff... and the caffeine is not in my favor :-P and here i've just spent 45 minutes typing away a novel of a brain dump... maybe now i'll go to sleep? (doubtful, but it's worth a shot... night y'all)