three days later -- i've still passed my quals, and i'm not still sick. well, one out of two ain't bad.

i spent much of my convalescent time reading (when i was completely zonked) and assessing (when i wasn't.) while the analysis that follows is completely personal, i think there are universal issues here that i hope to prompt you to think about.

it seems like i have, broadly speaking, three types of interests:

and whichever category is dominant in my constellation seems to define my life. i'm starting to realize that game-playing friends can be as durable as everything-else friends, who i always assumed were the most durable. it's weird; i consider my lifelong friends "real" because we'll always pick up the friendship when we are back in the same place (at least), while i consider my game-playing friends "transient" (and i don't mean to offend; transient things are extremely important to me) because the friendship will go away when we're not in the same place. but, of course, this is just the same concept expressed in a positive way versus a negative way.

anyway, it's category two that's something of a mystery. i can't quite put my finger on it, but one symptom is that most category-two things are asocial. falling into this category are writing clever scripts and doing math -- they're both puzzle-solving, but your competition is the world and not other people. in a way this is better, because it's more constant and thus easier to assess (not that the world is constant but that the ability to figure out a wide variety of things is, as well as the fact that each specific task falls into this category), but of course it's also worse since you don't get the smiles that only people can bring.

i rarely smile when there aren't people around. it's interesting, since my smiles when people are around are something i've never though of as voluntary.

i've been thinking about all this in relation to marriage. i don't think i'm close to getting married, but category two is comprised of things that i just can't see myself doing married (or in a shared-bedroom sort of situation, more to the point.) there's a bit of a paradox floating around here: the ability to spend time in the same room not communicating (sleeping, reading, etc..) is critical (i think) to a marriage-type situation, yet by definition it shouldn't be hard to fulfill. maybe this is why so many marriages stay together -- because it takes a long time to develop that comfort level and so you see something lacking in everyone you meet. even though it doesn't require extreme compatibility to acquire. (or maybe it does.)

50% seems like a high divorce rate, but from the mathematician's perspective 50% also seems like a high success rate for marriages. there's that problem of trying to pick the record high from a random sequence, the marriage problem, and the probability of success is at most 1/e (around 37%) regardless of strategy. which is to say, the odds of you picking the best person to get married to is 37%. and that's with total symmetry and everything.

i guess you have the people who never get married. if i recall correctly this is also 37% of the population, with the remaining 26% being people who pick the "wrong record high." in the mathematical setting.

all right, enough with the professional mumbo-jumbo. the point is that my lifestyle right now is completely incompatible with marriage. to start with, i spend probably six hours a day in my room listening to music (while doing a variety of other solipsistic tasks.) and it goes on from there.

kelli's visits of me, for instance, have turned out badly because it requires major lifestyle changes for me to accomodate even a visitor in whose mind i am unlikely to change much. at this very moment, i couldn't be doing this if kelli were here. partly for personal space reasons, but also partly because this is a very 100%-me activity, and having someone that ambient (in the sense that they contribute to the "defined environment" around you) turns you into not 100%-me in this way. this isn't a bad thing -- it's fun to have different characteristics at different times -- but most of the time i am 100%-me (there are different such personas, of course), and that's something that just isn't the case when i have a cohabiter.

and of course this is more pronounced in a marriage situation.

it's times like this when one really understands the different-bedrooms marriage philosophy. it's probably not something you would notice when it happens, but it might work. i don't know -- fortunately i'm in a position where no one's counting on me to fulfill their idea, so you get everything i think unfettered. it's sort of analogous to today in the math department, when there were three of us wanting to play a card game. now, of course, there are no three-person card games, so i was easily able to convince the other people to let me invent something on the spot. i did. it was a bad game, but the newness more than made up for it, and one hand of it was certainly better than one hand of anything else we could have played.

i believe there's a niche in this society for people who output this newness, this tingle of novelty. improv comedy troupes are in this niche, but, like everything capsulated to one domain, it can be generalized to life. i think i can fill this niche.

i now have a plan for my life. check back in 15 minutes, because, after all, i might have something new then.

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