the germane sense, i think, is that i've gotten a lot stranger. the emails i wrote then are so form-based; i don't take liberties with the english language, i use mixed case assiduously, and i'm talking about such generic topics. but what has changed internally to cause this external shift? i have no idea.
this is disturbing for a number of reasons, most counter to the fact that one shouldn't worry about things that one can't change. in that group lie things like: what if i'd been the person i am now throughout college? if i search hard enough for a break point, a discontinuity along the way, i can find one: may 27, 2000 works okay. which gave me only a week or two in college with my so-called new persona. what if my entire college life had been like that? it's a curious question.
but there are more wide-ranging implications here. i've apparently changed a lot in four years despite not really going through any life-shattering events; what does that say about how the people i haven't seen in four years have changed? what does that say about how the people i know now will be in four years? does it imply that the people i've known continuously for four years have also changed as much as i have without me realizing it in them either? i have email from other people, of course, and i don't see it, but maybe i just don't care enough.
when i was in college, i got a lot of fake flak for dating freshmen. i don't think it was a coincidence, but i had reasons beyond simply preying on the innocent. as people grow older, they ... i wouldn't call it becoming jaded so much as feeling less. i didn't understand why this happened to people, but as i see it start to happen to me i now see why the process happens. because as you grow older, you have so much more stuff to deal with. an appropriate microcosm here is taxes. when i was filling out my taxes, there were so many things that i was supposed to have on hand or have kept track of, some of which i did and some of which i didn't. and while we don't have to do taxes everyday, i could feel the life being sucked out of me.
when one is confronted with so many things to do that one doesn't really care about, it's numbing. i'm not getting jaded in the sense that i think things will turn out badly in the end; i'm getting jaded in the sense that i don't think things will affect me, so i don't see the point in putting effort into them. i'm on autopilot. i feel like a philosopher's thought experiment: my autopilot is, to the outside world, (i think), indistinguishable from my usual self (when i want it to be, as opposed to when i'm pleading for attention, which happens far too often for my taste), but there's no mind inside.
i feel compelled to interject here with another california blurb. something occurred to me today: i feel confident enough to make a guarantee. if you come out to california, and you like the values or person or whatever expressed in this space (or this one), i can guarantee that you'll be happy here. there are four reasons. three of them are people: myself and two friends who i can introduce you to. the fourth is the weather, which softens even this hardened new yorker. there are more reasons, of course, but i guarantee you that these will make you happy. it's hard to imagine a person who would not appreciate one of these four things.
i can't guarantee that you'll continue to be happy, because i can't guarantee that the people will stay, that the people will like you enough to continue putting effort into you, or that the weather won't get corrupted by global warming. but i can promise you some reserve of happiness that's waiting for you here.
all right, back to the philosophers' zombie or zimboe or whatever that i have become. it's so easy to become this way; i don't want to use pejorative language because i'm not sure it has a moral sense associated to it. i'm wondering if it's inevitable in a godel's incompleteness theorem sort of way: if you're exposed to enough of the world, you will inevitably have your lifeforce or attention or something spread too thin. this is kind of the generalist/specialist thing again, except this time it's flipped, because i'm talking about what you expect of the world and not the other way around. so any person who is diverse enough to understand all these things and take all these things into their life will end up losing the curiosity that got them to that point.
there's a serious hole in this argument, of course, which is that it doesn't really make any sense. it doesn't give you a good idea of the causation involved, and it doesn't achieve the mathematical zen of having something imply its opposite.
for a while now i think i've been assuming that the math life is not for me, at least with respect to my actions. lately i find myself back-rationalizing that i'm not going to make it, so the best thing for me to do is to help other people make it -- i guess with respect to life in general, not with respect to math. i've resigned myself to failure as far as my own happiness goes, but that doesn't render my life worthless; if a person's happiness ranges from 0 to 1, then if i pay it forward by increasing others' happiness by a total of more than 1, that's success, even if i'm flatlining at 0. it's a very religious and utilitarian way of looking at the world.
i hasten to add that i haven't done any of this consciously. but given that i've only really felt something once in the past month (not counting my sickness, which certainly impacted my life), it 's certainly a reasonable way to interpret the situation. with respect to lots of particular things, too; if i'm not going to find true love, then success will come in helping others do so (which i would do anyway, but the implication being that if one way to succeed is impossible it behooves you to channel more energy into other ways.) so if i can consort with jeremy about his romantic exploits (slander!) i'm doing good.
math is similar. if i'm going to fail here (by which i mean fail to find happiness here), what i should do is put more energy into teasing out the inner workings of the math-happiness interaction, and guiding others. i think this is why i was so peeved that bridget didn't end up coming here; i think that the berkeley math department is a great place for a person to be, and i think bridget has a chance to succeed (by which i mean to be happy, not to become a great mathematician, which is irrelevant for the purposes of the discussion and which i'm unqualified to judge anyway.) i think california will bring her, and most of you, happiness, and my goal, if i cannot have it for myself, is to make sure that others don't hit the metaphorical wall, especially those (like bridget) who have a chance not to.
and, of course, it doesn't hurt that she's cute.