I keep thinking about Seymour Glass. That story is stuck in my head and it won't get unstuck. Right when I thought that I had finally figured out why he would kill himself for being too happy, it turns out that I had it all wrong...

I read some of the interpretations of the story on the internet. Seymour was clearly unhappy - having been in World War II had a deep impact on him - after the discharge, he spent some time in a hospital for psychiatric evaluation - a condition that is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. After the war, he was having a hard time readjusting to the life in the U.S., which was becoming more and more materialistic. The bananafish is to symbolize greed - these fish, looking like any ordinary fish, swim into a banana hole, where they consume large number of bananas. "I've seen a bananafish eat as many as seventy-eight bananas..." They get so big that they get stuck in the hole and eventually die of banana fever.

And here's where I'm stumped - although this is more of an indicative of my ignorance about depression and PTSD, than anything else... If you're unhappy, there is always something you can do about it. It's being happy that you can do nothing about...

Even if you're scarred by the horrors of the world, you live through it out of spite - to prove that despite all that, human will for life and goodness prevails... You just don't give up like that, calmly and methodically...

***

If I were to document at least a portion of this trip, here is how it would go:

• I travel like a prissy American girl. 
• Despite carrying with me copious amounts of reading materials and math textbooks, and having made lofty plans to get a lot of work done during my layovers, I managed to do absolutely nothing, killing huge chunks of time by listening to music and completely zoning out. It was oddly comforting...
• Speaking of comforting - there is nothing more comforting than the sight of a ham and cheese sandwich that I had in a nondescript eatery near my hotel in Covilha shortly upon my arrival. After bad airplane food, skipped breakfast and the granola bar that I had on the train from Lisbon to here, this piece of fresh baguette stuffed with slices of ham and Swiss cheese was nothing but a slice of heaven itself...
• Four in the morning, local time: "Your green dot is on! I'm jet lagged and hungry and looking for people with green dots to talk to, since it is too early to go look for food. Indulge me please, otherwise I'll have to talk to my uncle." "Not your uncle! What time is it there?" Conversations with Flenner are a delight! 
• I still cannot shake off Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish." For the longest time that story bothered me. It was one of Salinger's stories that I read only once, right after reading "Raise the Roof Beam High, Carpenters." Somehow, during all these years, I had the story wrong - in my mind, those two had merged, and I thought that Seymour  killed himself because he was too happy, whereas, in fact, Seymour was too happy to show up to his own wedding. All this time, that's what I thought went on in the story, and all this time I couldn't figure out why one would kill oneself because one is too happy. But then, a couple of weeks ago, I caught myself thinking "I'm so happy I could die..." and "If I were to die today, I would die happy..." And I immediately thought of Seymour Glass - I thought, "Aha, I finally know why!" And then, on Saturday, I reread the story, and it was not at all how I remembered it, for Seymour was clearly far from being happy...
• This place is a bloody good place to feel existential about things...

Covilha

I'm in Covilha, Portugal, still in a pleasant shock that despite my complete lack of direction and any sense of orientation, I managed to bring myself, all in one piece and without any adventures to this middle of nowhere place. I am finally on my own, for the first time in the longest time, in a very unfamiliar place, far removed from everything that I know. And yet, I have never been at more ease with myself and this new place. This feeling of calm, quiet confidence, the awareness of  how easily I move in space, occupy this new space, fit in without fitting in. Like the cliche - wherever you go, there you are...

***
I decided to ditch the conference and spend my time soaking in this solitude. I never have a chance to be alone anymore, despite the fact that there are very few things that I like more than being on my own. Likewise, there are only a few things that compare to being alone in a quiet, quaint and unfamiliar place.

***
I think I'm going through something, although I am not quite sure what. I have been feeling this mixture of ennui and longing, my usual precursors of existential crises of sorts. Now I have to figure out where it's coming from and what exactly has brought this on...

***
This place, of all the places in the world, is a bloody good place to feel existential about things.

***
Curiously though, unlike my previous crises of this sort, this one hasn't completely consumed me (at least not yet). It is as if there is a part of me that watches it unfold as an objective specter, with all of the amusement and "Are you fucking kidding me? Not this again!" look on her face.

***
I'm not sure what it is about this place that brings about this strongest, almost overwhelming feeling of longing, even though what exactly it is that I am longing for is not at all clear to me.

***

I cannot account for the last five years. Sure, I can enumerate the events that took place during this time, like getting a job, quitting running, getting engaged, getting married, buying a house, going to Rome, publishing a paper, getting a cat, etc.

But besides these events, everything else is a blur. I cannot account for either my mental or emotional states, mostly because I do not think I was aware of these states, or of myself as much... It is easy to lose this awareness when one is busy thinking about unmeasurable sets, or convergence of recursive sequences... They leave little time or desire to think about anything else, existential or otherwise...

"Mathematical truths are 'trivial' - they are true only in a trivial, purely formal sense of 'true' (i.e. namely by definition or by derivation from arbitrarily posited axioms, rules of operation, and primitive definitions)."

Donald Crosby
The Specter of the Absurd

Hell Must Have Frozen Over

It’s Sunday night, late March, and it’s snowing. Work has two hour delayed opening tomorrow, so I am staying up. And just like that, on a whim, I am resurrecting this blog. I have had this nagging feeling lately to start blogging again, so I am giving in, in hopes that it turns into something more substantial than a fleeting whim. To be quite honest, it is somewhat a lunatic idea, given my current time constraints and the fact that there are only finite hours in a week to deal with everything that is and will remain on my plate for the foreseeable future. So I am not sure how committed I will be to writing here regularly, but what the hell...

I remember fondly the time when I used to write here more or less regularly (relatively speaking, of course), of the handful of comments that I would get from the people I grew quite fond of without knowing them in real life (does being friends on Facebook count?). I read back some of the entries I wrote in the past and they make me nostalgic… As a side note – I truly miss Digest. T.S.T – I hope you’re reading this…

Anyway, last time I wrote here, I was in a midst of a self-created existential crisis of a mess that, in an attempt to rationalize, I had reduced to a two-dimensional choice dilemma. I was ambivalent about my relationship, torn about future career paths, and in general was having what in shrink-land is commonly refereed to as an “adjustment reaction.”  And yes, my therapist told me so, but more on that later, perhaps. For now I will just highlight some of the major things that have happened since them, although each probably deserves a more detailed post of its own at some point.

Since you last heard from me:

-          I finished my Master’s program in Economics.

-          Got enrolled (somewhat accidentally and half-heartedly) in a PhD program in Systems Modeling and Analysis (a hybrid between Statistics, Applied Mathematics and Operations Research).

-          Landed myself an awesome (and hard to come by) research job at a place that I will refer to as the Macroeconomic Mecca. While the job itself was temporary (2-3 years tops), it put me on an excellent track in the event I decided to pursue a PhD in Economics. I decided not to.  Where is my “I am not an Economist and am Proud of It” t-shirt? Since then, I switched departments within the Mecca and currently work at a similarly awesome (albeit less glorified) research job.

-          The boy and I got engaged.

-          I turned thirty. The last two events happened all on the same day!

-          I became a proud citizen of the United States.

-          Three days later, and somewhat accidentally, I signed the purchase agreement for the first house that the boy and I bought together, and just like that, I became a first-time home buyer. Remember the days when buying a couch would give me a meltdown? It’s amazing how things can change…

-          The boy and I got married.

-          And currently (you know where I am going with this, don’t you?), with part reluctance, part trepidation and all encompassing fear, I am contemplating the idea of having an offspring. And of course, existential hang-ups abound. Things, after all, are quite predictable with me.

So, in a matter of three years, I went from being a wistful graduate student to being (ahem)… a wistful graduate student, while moving up an age-box,  getting a “real” job, changing my marital status and becoming a homeowner. So Day in the World will still be running under Graduate Edition for quite a while. Quite frankly, doing a PhD part time, while juggling a full time job and a part time job on the side and simultaneously trying not to completely fail at being a wife takes a lot of time (and not to mention the effort). Any advice on how to maintain a semblance of sanity will be appreciated. But more on that later, perhaps…

A lukewarm, ambivalent, equivocal relationship, with no definitions, too many unspoken words and too much uncertainty. At its best it is comfortable and comforting in its familiarity, at its worst it's got no reference points or indications that it could potentially grow beyond what it is and become something more definite, or rather, definable - that is objectively. And if I were to describe myself in this relationship I would be nice, agreeable, undemanding, yet at the same time slightly neurotic and sporadically emotional (at least at moments when i don't try to restrain myself), whereas he's calm, rational, level-headed in a non-flippant way, nice by his nature rather than by circumstances. This pretty much sums it all up, and yet to elaborate a little more (although I am not sure why I continue this pointless exercise), I'd give it credit for being civilized to the extent that there are no sharp disagreements or unnecessary arguments, let alone fights, and that our differences are reconciled in a quiet, compromising and complimentary way. It's a polite relationship. Respectful. Considerate towards each others' immediate needs and discomforts. And yet it still is what it is - a lukewarm, ambivalent, unequivocal relationship...

...and the question is, what do I do now, that I am finally able to objectively see it for all it is.

One day it will all be a distant memory, Nika, yet I can tell you now, with the supreme confidence of someone who's gone ahead in time to know, that you'll look back on this life and be so flush with love and admiration for yourself, your journey, and who it made you, that you'll wonder, as I do now, how it could possibly have escaped you then.

Maybe this will help.

Your greater-self,
The Universe

Theorem: Every natural number is INTERESTING.

Proof (by contradiction): Suppose there exist some numbers that are not interesting. Then by the well-ordering principle, there has to be a least such number.  But that would be INTERESTING. Contradiction!

Therefore, every natural number is interesting. ■

Consider a simple two dimensional choice dilemma

Suppose you have two choices, option A and option B, A ≠ B. The constraints are such that you cannot choose both. Each one of these options is equally appealing, yet choosing each will lead to a drastically different outcome. Each outcome, in its turn, is just as appealing as the other, i.e. you know that you can be happy with either outcome. An economist, then, would say that you are indifferent towards either one of these choices, since each choice gives you the same utility (fancy word for satisfaction). Except that in real life you’re not “indifferent” in the true meaning of the word, because (i) you can’t compare these choices, since outcomes are so different that we’re talking apples and oranges at this point; (ii) when you choose A, you will never know what it’s like to have chosen B and vice versa. Therefore by choosing A you have eliminated the possibility that you could ever have B (and vice versa). That does not leave a lot of room for indifference now, does it?

Q: How would you make your choice?

Nine millions bicycles

Every time I see Sevada, no matter how long it’s been and how much catching up it involves, our conversations always end up with discussion of music - about how we can no longer bring ourselves to listen to Zeppelin; about the immortality of the Stones and the fact that Mick Jagger might just as well be the sexiest man alive; about the merits and demerits of the new U2 album; about our lack of interest in “sad bastard” music and how instead of falling for the next generic alternative band number one hundred and eleventy six, we are now slowly switching towards the mellow, more ear pleasing tunes of the newly found and (relatively) less famous and nonetheless favorite artists of ours… These type of discussions inevitably lead to grand music swaps of sorts, although long gone are the days when we’d trade Sonic Youth for Pearl Jam (! Sonic Youth, by the way, sucks. I don’t know what business I had listening to it in the first place).

Sevada seems to be into chick music these days. I am not a particularly big fan of chick music – too loaded, too emotionally charged for me. But then, sometimes there is just that one song that is so perfect in its simplicity and so harmoniously melodic that I can’t stop listening to it over and over and over again…

More on Katie Melua here.

Oh the wonderful world of possibilities

Sometimes I wish I could get a contractor job with the State Department and move to Armenia on some kind of a foreign policy “mission”, taking the boy along with me, and he would teach history to the embassy brats and do whatever else historians do when they are in a country full of history, and we would live the good life of pretentious expats and scout out neighboring Georgia, Turkey and Russia on long weekends…


At other times I want to just say “Fuck it” and apply to the Math PhD program here at VCU and stay in Richmond forever (or at least for the foreseeable future) without having to move or think about anything else but being happy and content… But then they tell me stuff like “You could do better than VCU. You should try to do better than VCU,” and that makes me want to smack people in the head because the fact that a VCU professor would tell me to go to a “better” school appears to me somewhat disturbing…


I know that between these two options there is a world of other, infinitely many possibilities. I also seem to have a much better idea than I did before about where I’d like to be in the next five/ten years. And yet, even though the shortest distance between point A and point B is always a straight line, that’s not how things usually work out for me, as far as choices are concerned… And this is just a tiny glimpse of the kind of an ongoing debate I have been having with myself that I am sure will be reappearing here on a more or less regular basis.


I do find it rather ironic that of all subjects in the world I chose the one that deals with decisions and choices while being the worst type of person whenever decision making is concerned. I wonder whether I need to really see someone about this…

A gentle reminder (to myself) about the importance of staying humble

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

Kurt Vonnegut

In about an hour I will be heading to class and life, as I have grown to know it during the past couple of months, will never be the same. Here's to the end of my summer indolence and to finally starting to have a thing or two accomplished. Frankly, it was starting to get a bit ridiculous around here.

On birthdays and things...

There’s a part in my favorite childhood book where Smidge and Karlson are trying to split a peach. They need a knife to cut the peach in half and before Smidge can fetch it from the kitchen, Karlson quickly finishes the peach and hands him what he calls the best part of the fruit– the big and sticky pit.

‘I always want you to have the best bit,’ he says. ‘If you plant this pit, you’ll get a whole peach tree stuffed full of peaches. You’ve got to admit I’m the world’s kindest Karlson, not making a fuss even though I only got one miserable little peach… A whole big peach tree! Think of that! At your fiftieth birthday party you’ll be able to give every last guest a peach for dessert, won’t that be nice?’

This has long become one of the favorite skits of my family. Recently, as my brother handed me the sticky pit of the peach that we were enjoying one afternoon, I caught myself thinking about how lovely it would be to have a peach tree on one's fiftieth birthday. “Let’s try to figure out when we’re going to celebrate our fiftieth birthdays,” I said, without putting much thought to what I was saying. “What an idiot you are,” said my brother before I realized what a retarded thing I had just said. “We’ll celebrate them tomorrow, how about that?” he continued, bursting into laughter. This is the part where those of my readers who think that I have even an ounce of intelligence are kindly asked to reassess their prior beliefs…

***

I was born on a cold Thursday, ten days after John Lennon was shot (you do the math). Nothing particularly significant about the day, except that it was the day when my grandfather got his license suspended when trying to rush my mother to the hospital. A day before my birth doctors had reassured my mother that I wouldn’t be due until a week after New Year’s. And were they all wrong! It is also worthy to note that I was supposed (expected) to be a boy. In fact, they were so sure about it that nobody entertained the fact that there’s a fifty percent chance of it NOT happening and when I came out of the womb without a penis, everybody assumed that it (the penis) got lost in the dark and murky corners of the birth canal. And since nobody had bothered to come up with a suitable name for a girl, for the first couple of months everybody called me Bob (or so they say). Eventually my mother named me Shushanika after her grandmother who wasn’t really her grandmother in biological sense, but that’s an entirely different story altogether.

I was never particularly fond of my birthday. And the older I grew, the more apathetic I became about the whole thing. It’s in an awkward time of year – cold and crappy. It’s a week before Christmas when the last thing one needs is to worry about celebrating a birthday. As long as I have been in school, my birthday has been during the most inappropriate time of the semester – right amidst the finals. Add to that the fact that I’m not usually big on birthday planning and you got the most boring birthday one could possible have year in year out. I am not sure whether it’s the lack of planning that makes me feel so apathetic on the day of my birthday or the other way around, but the long short of it is that I HATE THE TIME OF YEAR THAT I WAS BORN. I don’t think I could be more emphatic about it.

To correct what I perceive as fundamental injustice of birthday deprivation, I have decided to celebrate my birthday any day I want and while I’m at it, why not have not one, but SEVERAL birthdays throughout the year? “Great!” thinks the boy “now I have that many more occasions to completely fuck this up,” as he tries to convince me that there’s nothing wrong with the day I was born and that I can’t just randomly have a birthday whenever the hell I want. So for those of you who have a problem with the term “birthday”, you can call these days “Nika Days”, “Nika Appreciation Days” or whatever have you, as long as there are red balloons involved.

So today is one of those days when I let myself and others around me “appreciate” the fact that I, indeed, exist. This is actually the main idea behind the whole thing – celebration of being rather than becoming. After all, what’s the point of it all if I can’t indulge in occasional frivolity like this? And if you’re looking for a way to show your own appreciation, feel free to have a cupcake or two in my honor, today or any other day you want.

To Whom It May Concern: It's Hot and Humid. A Quiet Richmond Afternoon

And since I can't seem to concentrate enough to produce any useful content of my own, below is a list of links that may catch your attention for the time being:

• I just returned from a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. I can't believe I have lived in Virginia for as long as I have and never visited Williamsburg until now. Some of the pictures have been posted on Flickr account that I have been neglecting for way too long.

• Letter From Tbilisi - it's good to know that someone was finally able to see that Georgia's last year's shenanigans were not only a hot-headed military and strategic mistake, but would also have long-lasting political and economic repercussions on the future of the country. Lets hope that not every Georgetown educated imbecile is in charge of a country. On the second thought - the world might have been an entirely different place now had it not often been the case.

• The financial crisis finally arrives in Armenia, looks around and says: "Has someone already been here before me?"

• On a brighter note - it's good to know that somewhere on the East Coast they make good coffee worthy of such praise. The "drizzle" at Starbucks is utterly undrinkable these days.

• Speaking of coffee - this is how real Armenian coffee is made (Armenian, and not Turkish, I said). And while we're at it, let me give you my own recipe for an absolutely divine version of the drink. Get bulk coffee and grind it at your local grocery store choosing the finest grind (either Turkish or Espresso). I suggest you chose lighter to medium roasts, since the coffee will turn out rather rich and thick. You can also experiment with mixing different blends, including flavored ones (I normally use one third French Vanilla, two thirds Columbia ). Put two teaspoons of the finely ground coffee in an 8oz cup and pour boiled water into the cup, like you would if you were making instant coffee. Let it sit for two-three minutes - the water is too hot for immediate consumption anyway and it lets coffee grounds fully soak in water and settle on the bottom of the cup. Add sugar (and cream) to taste. Once the coffee grounds are fully settled, enjoy (stop drinking though when there's about an inch of coffee left in the cup, otherwise you'd be drinking the grounds). I have noticed that filtering, percolating and even French pressing gives coffee an unpleasant acidic and burnt taste, whereas this beverage turns out amazingly smooth and velvety. A word of warning though - this coffee is very strong, so don't go too crazy with it (a cup of coffee is known to have enough caffeine to kill a horse as you may know it).

• Twelve Weeks to Better Photos by Two Peas in a Bucket - a guide to digital photography that I find very useful as I am trying to figure out a thing or two about my new favorite toy. Time permitting, I am planning to post weekly updates of my digital experiments.

• How to care for Phalaenopsis, more commonly known as orchids found at any grocery store.

• What if loggers ran the world? What can I say - I'm a sucker for commercials in general and this one in particular.

• I really really love this post of Alphabet History.

• It's August and Everything after and although this year I don't have anything new to add to what I already said last year, I am staying true to the tradition and bringing my summers back.