but on the other hand, i can communicate with him. i can interact with him on a reasonable level. i can't do that with someone 18 years younger than me. the logical conclusion, i suppose, is that time slows down as you age. obviously i expect to be more similar at 41 to my current persona than the now-me is to the five-year-old me.
looking at pictures, though, it's not entirely clear that the five-year-old me is that different. if i look hard enough, i can see the same angel-devil smile and outlook, the half-devil's advocate and half-child which is some sort of descriptor of the 23-year-old mike.
i really have no idea what my life will be like even at 28. right now i'm a mathematician, i'm thinking so much about math, to the extent that math is having more of an effect on my moods and emotions than the ups and downs of personal interaction. this is a first. at 18 there's no way i would have predicted that. at 18 i had just come back from my first summer at duluth, secure in the knowledge that math could be a fine life if i wanted it, but hardly infatuated. i figured, okay, it's a viable and fulfilling career.
and i sort of felt that it would always play second fiddle. i'm having deja vu to a conversation with adrienne, lying in bed, sometime around february of 2000. i don't remember anything about it except that somewhere in there was the idea, look, math is fine, but it's not really going to inform my graduate school decision. i remember being very sure that math was going to be a diversion and not my life.
as i've grown from 18 to 23, one of the major differences is that my life has become more unified. it's not like i have math in one compartment and people in another -- after all, my new favorite people are the people in this math program, from my kickass colombian officemate to my subjunctive replay matthias. i feel like i am in the math community rather than simply in math.
everything else has sort of unified too. activities and people. having a car i think is a factor here; it ties together the facets of my life, because instead of for instance flitting back and forth between discrete states (new york and boston, the science center and lowell), i take the transportation as such an integral part of the fabric of my life that it doesn't seem at all jarring. i slide into my car, and it's a continuous change of environment. i'm not sure which is the chicken and which the egg here.
and i can see it happening from 23 to 28, or 41. adults, of course, have integrated multivariate lives; bernd has parties for math people at his house with his wife and kids, his friends are largely math people. for an academic, i guess it turns out that way -- because math is so delocalized, i'm always thinking about it, and it makes sense that this would start rubbing off on my social mind for instance. (obviously i have always had a focused view of things, which is in a similar chicken-egg relationship with being vocationally interested in mathematics.)
it's weird, though, because i also, as i keep mentioning, feel like i'm on the verge of going crazy, that everything is about to disentangle. but maybe that's not true. i've had quite a few premonitions about stuff like that recently, wrong ones; i was convinced i was going to go into a depression spiral when i got back from duluth, which didn't happen, and i was convinced my current math kick was going to burn out a while ago, which also didn't happen. i guess i should realize that, well, i'm less fickle at 23 than at 18.
but i still remember that old fickle me. wistfully in a way; it's like wasting my life, if the change from 23 to 41 is equivalent to the change from say 15 to 23. living life 9/4 as slowly. and we only have so much time in this world. it struck me the other day that we could just die at any minute, that having plans to do something in the future is only worth so much. and i almost started to cry, because there's a lot i want to do that i might not get the chance to, people i want to see again and live in the same city with and so on, people i want to meet and have eclectic friendships with (by which i mean types of people, i guess, although that's not right either -- but in any case these people are hypothetical and i haven't met them yet.)
you only get to live once. on the one hand, right, this is sad, because you don't get to pursue parallel lives. i don't get to see what would have happened if i'd gone to mit for grad school (though federico is showing me a side of that), i don't get to see what would have happened if my parents hadn't gotten divorced (vastly different life; for one thing, i likely have a strong australian accent), i don't get to live ten lives and take the average to find out what i'm intrinsically like. there is no law of averages in things that happen once; luck has played a tremendous role in my life but it's impossible to tease out.
but on the other hand it's incredible that we get to live even the once. that we get to try things out, that we have so much time with the causality engine of life. it's sad to think that things will not be as exciting from now until 41, at least seemingly. so i don't, at least not emotionally.
life is good. not much to report which doesn't involve ridiculously cool math.