Brimstone and Derivatives

For some reason, fall always makes me feel like a bit of a loser. It's back to school time, and I miss going to school. I would have been a fairly happy lifetime student. I love books with a passion that should make Toby nervous.

Let's put it this way: when I have dreams at night about living in a big city, I dream of three things in particular: a huge library, many food wagons with street food, and junk stores full of low-priced awesome clothes and shoes in my size. Is that too much to ask? It's kind of my holy trinity of material wants.

On the flip side, I was a fairly lazy and procrastination-prone student, even in the subjects I loved most. I also have dreams that it's halfway through the semester, and I panic, realizing that there is a class that I haven't attended even one time. It's usually a math class.

Now, I was a physics major, with emphasis in Astronomy. I dearly love astrophysics, plus telling someone you're a physics student is a surefire way to intimidate them. The problem is, with professional physics comes insane math. I always loved science as a kid, but somehow managed to not pay much attention in math until high school. Not that I was a bad student, but I don't think that I had a rock-solid foundation of instinctual mathematics at my disposal.

If you ever want to meet some interesting people, hang out with physics or math professors. I had a Calculus teacher in Springfield who was also a preacher. The funny thing was, his lecture style was much like his sermon style must have been, just with different information being imparted to the listener. Have you ever imagined a sort of hellfire and damnation description of taking a derivative? I think I got saved during that class.

One physics professor had his office deep in the recesses of the science building, near his materials science laboratory. To get help with my classwork one day, I walked past about fifteen "NO SMOKING" signs and knocked on his door. As he was chainsmoking, and helping me with a velocity problem, I noticed a stack of about fifteen laptops in the corner. According to physics-student lounge legend, he just bought a new one each time his cigarette smoke clogged the old to death. We also speculated about how many gray pullover sweater vests he might own, since he wore one every single day. We always hoped it was more than one...

Another favorite calculus professor was of latin descent. Have you ever seen the Muppet movies? You know the shrimp who refers to himself as a king prawn? That is the exact same accent this math professor had. Now, complicated math has a whole language of its own, with terms like integration, sigma, derivative, tangent, asymptote, upper limit, and infinity. Many times, I glanced at another student and saw the expression that was surely on my own face: "What did he just say?" It was like hearing a text translated into French, and then into Hebrew.

Maybe I'll wait a few years before I think about going back. I bet I could borrow Livvie's notes.