Oh hey, whats up?

This blog has become a neglected red-headed stepchild of sorts. I haven't given up on it though,  I guess the first spree of posting was a lot of pent-up stuff I had been waiting to write about and had finally found an an outlet for and now I have returned to a normal flow of ideas. Things for me have been good lately, it really provides contrast to some of the lame times I've written about previously. Specifically I'm pleased that I was able to stay happy through all of it, albeit I'm definitely even more happy now. I think I'm coming to terms with being a stats major, at least enough to not retake math 3000, as much as I enjoyed it. I still get to do a lot of critical thinking which is all I liked about math anyway other than the curiosity aspect. Today I did my first tutoring gig, it was for college algebra so today is also the first time I've ever profited off my math skills, it felt really weird yet its nice to have money. I get to use the money to go on a date today which is even better, especially considering the girl. It certainly doesn't feel like it should be December but it also doesn't feel like we ever left the 2000's and even more-so it weirds me out that I have nearly two decades of experience factoring into these feelings.

This is where I'd like to delve into something that's been on my mind recently or some adage I'd like to share but I can't really do either mostly because its so damn late and my brain is already asleep. Just try to do things that scare you along with the minor things that make you unconditionally happy and you'll probably have a pretty good life. Oh, also try to ad-lib things as much as possible.

Till next time

A special request

I haven't written a post in a while and unfortunately this will be short. I guess I haven't posted in a while because the past weeks have been a little bit hectic in a lot of ways and I have sworn not to post under duress. However, that same duress along with Thanksgiving gave me a little bit of inspiration for a post.

In Philosophy of Film we discuss a lot of bullshit, I'm sure you guys knew this from the class name but still. There are two things that have really hit me in that class. The first is a quote from Grey Gardens that goes roughly 'All things are good that never happened'. The other came from our lecture about tragedy. In it the professor detailed the idea that tragedy within film is able to happen because we allow ourselves to bond to the characters. We allow ourselves to take on their romances, heartaches and burdens. The part that stuck with me is how that applies to my relationships with people. It seems to me that just like a film becomes more tragic as someone takes on more emotional burden a relationship becomes stronger the same way. When a stranger tells me an unfortunate thing that happened to them I have empathy for them from being a fellow human being but I would quickly revert to my base emotion. When one of my very close friends does the same thing there is a good chance that it would truly get to me and I would have trouble going back to a passive emotion. This applies to both wonderful and awful circumstances of course. My point is essentially that we shouldn't take the people around us for granted because they often hold a large burden by simply caring. My friends are there to empathize with me when things are rough and show up with high fives when things are great. I don't really know where I'd be without that other than far worse off. Heres to embracing the good, and riding out the bad with all the people you care about.


p.s. I actually didn't post all week because I was listening to the new kanye album on repeat

Good things come to those who wait

That title doesn't have much attachment to this post other than this paragraph. It's a classic idiom but my favourite use of it is probably from the song "If Rap Gets Jealous" by K'naan. His use of it refers to finally being able to leave Somali during the horrific civil war to start a career in Canada. Mine just refers to feeling like I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Over the past couple months I've had some lame stuff happen but its definitely coming to a conclusion and as naive as it might be I feel like part of it has to do with making a point to never succumb to the bad parts of life and embracing every aspect of the good. I guess what I mean is that I never stopped being happy, but over the past weeks I haven't even had the choice.

The reason I clicked new post has to do with a conversation I had wednesday night. The girl I was with brought up the thought that certain moments in life will not look like we idealize mentally. Her specific example had to do with not knowing which family members will be alive to see your wedding. Who knows if you've met your best man yet, who knows if your fiance will have a "baby-bump" at the wedding, you get the idea. In math they have what is called a deterministic process. It is a process in which there is no randomness, if you know the current state you can with full accuracy determine the future state. We all secretly imagine that life is like this, we make ourselves guilty of the thought process wherein knowing our plans right now somehow gives us a guarantee that the future will be just how we like it. Oftentimes , mostly from motivational speakers, life is described as a series of choices. Stay in school or drop out, ask that girl out or keep walking, etc. The overlying philosophy that I've been trying to knit with this blog refers exactly to that. Possibility A: Go to college/drop out and end up very happy, Possibility B:Go to college/drop out and end up unhappy. I think you see the pattern but I enjoy spelling it out. There are two sides to all of those choices that lead to other choices and it can become a giant tree that shows where your life is going. I say that we should all look at the third side of the coin(*wink*) which is choosing to love your life no matter what choices are made or what happens to you. You can't count on your Uncles and Cousins all being there when you say "I do." but you can absolutely count on yourself to make the best of it whether they are or aren't.  Mathematicians and Physicists rarely get to work with deterministic systems but they make due, there is absolutely no reason that someone can't do the same with life. Enjoy your friday night everyone, or like my Dad said to me everyday he dropped me off at school, "Make a great day!"

"Well, how did I get here?"

Today's post starts off with a bit of background information for my readers that haven't taken a calculus based stats course. In Statistics there two different types of functions, discrete functions and continuous functions. A discrete function is only defined for a given set of values, i.e. {1,2,3,4,5}.









A continuous function is the type of function that is traditionally dealt with in math past algebra I, a function defined over an interval i.e. (1<x<5).








The reason those two ideas are important has to do with how the flow of ones life is perceived. It is clear that realistically life can be either one depending on whether you look at it from the present tense or past tense. If you look back over the last five years things seem somewhat discrete because life appears as a series of big events with essentially "blank" spaces in-between much like a discrete distribution. However, if you look at say the past week everything flows very smoothly and appears discrete. The reason I bring this all up is that today for some reason felt like a discrete point to me. I have been living in an apartment for 5 months now. I am no longer a math major. I am happy for legitimate reasons rather than just because its my personal philosophy to never waste time being depressed. None of those things are individually a big deal but I still have those moments every once in a while where I ask "Well, how did I get here?"(be sure to click that link, great video). I ask this question because much like I mentioned earlier everything this semester seems very discrete.  It feels like it was just yesterday that I ate lunch for the first time with Koleen, Morgan, and Dorothy but it's actually been about 4 months. The only legitimate explanation I can think of for this phenomenon is that this is a result of me not letting a day go by where I am not enjoying my life. Much like how some people might slip into several unmemorable months due to depression I think I may have slipped into a streak of completely fluid bliss. To be clear, I am 100% ok with this.

I was contemplating saving this for another post but I've got a solid 20 minutes until my plans for the evening start so I'll throw it in real quick. Yesterday was awesome, really awesome. I got to partake in two guilty pleasures that I assumed were lost in my childhood and best of all I got to enjoy it with my bros. The two aforementioned activities were playing around at a local "crick" and enjoying the innocent pleasures of a park. It makes me very happy to have people around me that are willing to let loose and just enjoy themselves. Hope you all have a nice evening, I'm off to start mine.

Sup dudes

My life has been more of the same, time with friends, school and basketball. Sports have been keeping me happy recently, for some reason Derrick Rose is free from the reign of season affective disorder. Yesterday was pretty great:basketball at the rec, watched the mizzou game, watched a movie, and then hung out with someone I haven't hung out with for months...for 6 hours. I've been having to "think happy" a lot recently which is worse than merely living happy but it comes with the territory. Between friends, music, and sports I'll be ok.

This is definitely my shortest blog post I know, but I'm not at all in the mood to write anything thoughtful right now. To compensate here is a song I made using just garageband this summer, it's a bit sketchy but I like it. 

song

A Red Letter Day

Today is a significant day. It is the eve of another big game in which Mizzou must either "nut up or shut up", it is the first truly cold day in CoMo, and it is also the fifth friday this month which is great. Those things being as extraordinary as they are still aren't the major reason today is a red letter day for me, the big reason is that I am sitting outside of a jiffy-lube waiting to get an oil change. The fact that I am outside of the jiffy lube isn't a big deal, it's about 80 degrees inside and I am ensconced in wool so the outdoors feel better. The important thing about this oil change is that it is 12:09 on a friday, during the meeting time of Math 3000, a class which I have gone into a great detail about on this very blog. I am not in that class because today I met with the excellent Dr. Morphurgo and filled out the papers to withdraw from it, immediately afterwards I set up a meeting to transfer into the Statistics department. Had I stayed in the course I have a good feeling that I could have pulled off a D or maybe even a C, I have managed to do stranger the things. The grade wasn't the reason I dropped, nor was the difficulty although both played a big role in decide to investigate the path of withdrawing. The main reason I chose to no longer be in this course boils down to my current philosophies in life, "do things that scare you" and "do not let a day go by unhappy". Most traditional things don't scare me very much, even basements and demons, however I'll admit that the idea of not being a math major scared me, as did "quitting" a course. Math has been the plan ever since I took Algebra II with one of my all time favorites, Mrs. Jones. I had just gotten out of geometry with Mr. Rose, a class which convinced me that I was essentially worthless when it came to math; the only thing I got out of the class was that Rose taught another class called "IB Higher Level Math", destiny was cast. The relationship I had with Ms. Jones was basically that she understood my test grades in no way reflected my actual intelligence or even my familiarity with the material of the class, unlike other teachers she realized that a B student might have higher than a B intellect. This was critical because she was the teacher who I needed to sign my paperwork to take the aforementioned HL math class in lieu of the required grade and thankfully she complied. For the next 2 years of my life I was in class with 8 other students studying college level mathematics every monday wednesday and friday. It is impossible to overstate the impact that class had on the way I process problems, my work ethic, and most of all my confidence. After passing my exit exams for HL I came to Mizzou tested into calc IIH and enrolled in the math dept, just accomplishing what seemed like another step on the ladder towards a B.S./MS/PHD in math. The reason I hopped off that ladder ties in directly with being happy everyday. Recently as I continued up the rungs of the ladder I started to see the "Ivory Tower" I was climbing towards, the infamous achilles heel of pure mathematicians. Call it a product of naivety but for some reason I assumed that the ivory tower was going to be far away, a place only post-docs resided. The truth of the matter is that as a first semester sophomore I was already going through the metal detectors and having my credentials checked to enter. The issue is that I never wanted to enter, the idea of having to give up on my personal life and my other interests to pursue one field sounds awful to me, as does not being able to talk to anyone other than fellow mathematicians about what I'm studying. I started to see the evidence of needed to subscribe to that lifestyle to succeed in math 3000, and thus I decided it wasn't for me and probably never will be. My relationship with math now gets to consist of taking only classes I enjoy and have interest in, I can casually read through a textbook to look at the ideas without worrying about whether or not I am able to prove the required theorems, its great. What drew me into my HL class so much was the puzzles and problem solving. Using calculus you can integrate the function f(X)=(h/b)x from 0 to b to get .5bh which is the area of a generic triangle. You can also take the cross product of the vectors <0,h,0> and to get bh which is the square formed by the vectors, so simply take half of that to get .5bh which again is the area of a generic triangle. I could give several more of those derivations touching on statistics, trig, and geometry. The point of those examples is that my relationship with math is based on connections and problem solving, the beauty of a solution rather than the formality of it. I believe that I can still keep this relationship just in the Stats dept. instead. My life is just too short to spend any time studying things that I don't like or are keeping me from happiness. One could argue that this decision will affect my future happiness because I will be entering a less lucrative field and they might be right. The issue is that nothing except for this instant is certain, no matter how much I try I cannot guarantee what my life will be life in 5 minutes much less 5 years, the only thing it makes sense to try and control are things that are immediately impacting me, what I'm listening too, who my friends are, what classes I'm in, etc. 

For the few of you reading this blog to keep up on my personal life I've been pretty good, things have been a bit rough lately but I'll be damned if anything is going to keep me down. Specifically I have been enjoying basketball lately. The nba started up tuesday so between catching up on blogs, fantasy, and trying to watch games I've had quite a bit of stuff too enjoy. I've also been going to the rec a couple times a week to play with Shawn which has been good, its always nice to have at least one guy there who isn't a complete tool. I've been playing alright, my shins have still been killing me but chugging aspirin as my post-game routine seems to help a little bit. I'm exam free for the next 2 weeks, it's halloween, and I feel free. Go out and love life readers, you are only guaranteed one.


90% of the songs I link are radiohead or kanye but whatevs. Fuck the haters.

An internal and external revolution(M-I-Z-F-O-U)

One of my biggest flaws is unfounded cynicism. These days it is mostly manifested in my weird perception of the present. For some reason I am the type of guy who would put the '08 Celtics championship on a lower rung than the '84 chip just because one of them happened in my lifetime, for some reason 1984 just sounds more prolific than 2008, stupid I know. The truth of the matter is that Kobe/Pau vs. The Big Three while both groups were at their peak might go down in history as even bigger than Magic/Kareem vs. Bird/McHale. By the same logic there is no reason other than cynicism to think that Kid A isn't just as good or dare I say better than what The Beatles put out. Jay Z is probably better than 'Pac and Kanye is definitely better than Nas. For some reason all of this seemed like it should have an asterisks next to it or be said with hesitation up until last night.

Tigers beat the spread by +12 to take down OU for the first time in 12 years. After the game students rushed the field as the marching mizzou came back on the field and played the fight song. The victory cements Missouri's presence in the conversation for not only the big 12 title but also for a possible national championship. Up until last night if I had read that I would have subconsciously placed the year around the '60s or '70's. However, as everyone knows that happened last night. History was made on Faurot Field and I got to be there in the 5th row watching it happen, I got to be knocked off the bleachers when we ran the first kickoff back for a touchdown, I got to listen as 71,000 fans screamed ZOU every time Gabbert got a clutch first down, and best of all I got to resist orders and rush the field with the rest of the student section as we got to celebrate possibly the biggest win in mizzou history. It also happens to be the most notable time in my life that I have felt like a part of history, and maybe the only time in my life that I have been physically present at something that isn't just noteworthy but might be the most noteworthy. Whenever Obama won I knew that history was being written but I also didn't care all that much because I don't expect much from politicians, I'm sure I would have gotten caught up in the moment had I been in Grant Park though. The reason last night had such an impact on me is that rather than watching a video of people thousands of miles away being overtaken by a moment they will remember for the rest of their lives I was in the video on the front page of espn celebrating on the field.

I could go on for several more paragraphs just about the game and the atmosphere, but I don't want to forget to mention/thank Shawn, Koleen, Morgan, and Dorothy for being such a big part of the weekend too. One of my favourite parts of homecoming was just being on campus walking around on thursday and friday and that would not have been nearly as fun if I had to be alone. You guys made me feel pretty lucky.

As if this month couldn't get any better next week has another big challenge for mizzou, several good NFL games, and the start of one of the most anticipated NBA seasons ever. Life continues to be excellent in pretty much every way.

Kind of a big deal

I really don't feel like writing today and I haven't for all of this week really. Normally I'm so overcome with thoughts that I need to get them out before I go nuts. However, recently I've been at a point where instead of thinking about life a lot I've been living it.  This isn't to say that I won't get back in my normal groove at some point but it's homecoming weekend in como and blogging is not my preferred way to spend it. All that matters is that I have had a great week for a variety of reasons and I'm pretty sure everyone who reads this thing has contributed a reason.
I leave you with this.

(self-titled)

I haven't posted in a while so I figured I might as well. I've got quite I bit I need to do for school but I also need to slow down and think for a bit so what you're reading is that compromise. I did really well on my stats exam today I think. I've always been aware of it but never really made much of the fact that I am way better at stats than I am at math, stats for me is about as close as I've ever gotten to something coming completely naturally to me. This is only an issue because I find math far more intriguing, and I refuse to take the easy way out. I guess I'll see how it plays out over this semester, I'd really like to at least take Advanced Calc.

Overall though things are great, I am living the life that I told myself was coming a year ago. I'm on a basketball team, I'm making more friends, I'm taking all interesting classes, and I like myself a lot more. All the stuff may sound trite to the layman but it's importance couldn't be over-stated for me. The one thing that still seems to plague me is my relationship dry spell. I don't know why either other than that it always seems to be a part of my winter mood swings. I have platonic companionship and I can easily get physical companionship. I guess the thing I need most from a relationship is the uniqueness of the relationship, the special role you get to play in someones else's life, a key role. The biggest frustration I have with being single is that I really feel like I would be great at filling that key role. Having someone to care about and implicitly another reason to get up in the morning would be great. Getting to make someone you care deeply about happy all the time sounds good too. I'm not too worried about it, when someone I'm into does come around the world isn't going to split open. I'm not even going to necessarily be way happier, just a different kind of happy. I enjoy every moment I get to be alive and that means taking advantage of not being tied to anyone and creating happiness out of it.

I would kind of like to write about this weekend but my math hw beckons. Thanks for sacrificing your free time to read my thoughts. Seriously.

this.

Some things take forever to cook.

I just got out of my phil. of film lab, today we watched a film called "Blood in the Face" about the american neo-nazi movement. This film tied in a little bit to some of the stuff I've been think about recently in regards to the status of rationality and belief within various conspiracy theory movements. What caught my attention today is the these neo-nazis believed that there is a legitimate ongoing "power movement" within every race and that the "white race" is losing to the other movements. This seems like a rather large pill to swallow yet the seemingly sane people believed it to such an extent that they were stockpiling weapons. Specifically, one of the leaders purported that the holocaust was the only reasonable response to the "jewish takeover" of the german economy. This ties in directly with the people who subscribe to the idea that JFK was assassinated because he wanted to remove troops from Vietnam which couldn't happen because of an intergalactic treaty formed with the aliens we hold discourse with underneath area 51 that JFK didn't know about because the Majestic 12 did not deem him worthy of the information. There is some fundamental tie between all crazy people, or possibly a number of ties, I have been pondering what it/they could be.

One of these ties is probably fear/anger. In the case of the neo-nazis one of their leaders told a story about not being able to get a government job in the late 60's and having to turn to construction even though he was a vet, this was probably because he was a registered nazi. However, he saw it as a direct result of social programs put in place by the U.S. after the civil rights movement. This misdirected anger combined with a lack of understanding of the labour force or U.S. government has caused him to spend his life taking out his anger against anyone who has been helped by social programs, i.e. minorities and "race traitors"(poor caucasians or minority sympathizers). There is unfortunately no specific example case when it comes to something like the JFK assassination but one can be generalized. Either someone was so angered by the way the assassination investigation was handled and the "failure" of the government to protect the President that they now place the blame on the U.S. government by claiming that they contracted/planned the entire assassination plot. Or in other cases they would rather believe that it was planned by the government/mafia because it is too scary to live in a reality where someone as important as the POTUS could be killed so easily. It is of my opinion that there is definitely something beyond what me know going on with JFK however, the tie still applies to the far edges of crazies(FBI/CIA/Russians etc.).

The implicit psychosis within the UFO/Area 51/Roswell movement is a lot harder to diagnose and likely contains a lot more mental illness rather than lack of education and hate. The easiest perspectives within the movement for me to understand are the ones that contend that the current "story" is too simple. For instance, many say that the reason Obama's view on transparency has changed so much post-election is that he found out about what is really at area 51, many people prefer to believe that rather than dealing with the sad truth of what politics really are. This view also applies to some sects of the 9/11 "truth" movement. For them it is preferably to believe they have a government that is purely evil and perpetrated the attacks rather than trying to understand how the government could let such an atrocity happen when it is now documented that they knew it was coming. Unlike the white power conspirators this group seems to be both interesting and harmless.

I had a really good day today. Hell, I've had a really good week. I'm really clicking with a new group of friends and it makes me quite happy. I'm one step closer to being on a team for basketball, I just need to officially join online. I knew that being on a team would be fun and everything but it has also had an great impact on my workouts, I find myself much more motivated when I have a reason to try(crazy right?). I also haven't had any feelings like I had yesterday. I think maybe I was feeling so disconnected because I didn't get to talk as much with people I can connect with, who knows, all that matters is that I feel like a million bucks and its not even the weekend yet. I am super pumped to see my friends back home, go to the corn maze, and just generally relax.

This version of "Idioteque" features Thom Yorke's vocals pre-distortion. They somehow become even more haunting.