miscellany

So, things are going well. Three weeks down at VT. I like my project, and I love the people I live and work with. We work hard, but we play hard too. We play volleyball almost every night and frisbee twice a week. I've learned how to do a cartwheel. I've had my hair completely done in braids. I've seen waterfalls and climbed trees and gone to the duck pond. It's been good.

On a sad note, Larry, my fish, died. He was sick. I was taking him to Petsmart, but he died before I could get him there. Sad day.

This weekend I'm home for my sister's graduation from high school. I'm so very proud of her. We did graduation this morning, and afterwards I got to see a bunch of people from the church I grew up in, which was good. A bunch of us went and saw The Strangers tonight. I laughed the whole way through it, but that's just what I do during cheesy scary movies

Tomorrow, I go to church and then head back to Virginia. For some bizarre reason I volunteered to watch the one-year-old nursery tomorrow during Sunday school. I suck at dealing with kids. I think that when Mom said that they needed help down there tomorrow I thought, hey, this is my opportunity to prove that I can totally take care of small children, despite common belief. So I told her I could help. She laughed at me. I took it as a challenge. I can so handle this.

Today I came to the conclusion that writing code soothes me. I think I take comfort in knowing that my carefully scripted lines will be interpreted in the same way time after time after time and that they won't change by themselves. I'm in control of my code. Nothing else has the power to change it. If there's something wrong, it's my fault, and it is within my power to fix it. I like that.

Does anyone else feel this way?

I think it's why I like housework sometimes too, especially when I'm nervous or upset. It is good to be able to put order into disorder, to make chaos livable.

I'm reading Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, and it's been talking a lot about how much resistance there was to zero or infinity existing. Early mathematicians had no notation for zero or infinity, and no representation of irrational numbers (numbers that can't be written as fractions), and in many sects suggesting the ideas of these things was tantamount to heresy. People were uncomfortable with the idea of void--it breaks a lot of properties that hold true for every other number. People were also uncomfortable with infinity, mostly because that's something we can't wrap our minds around. Yet zero and infinity are incredibly important concepts for higher level math. Calculus and physics are impossible without them.

To be honest, I'm afraid I'm a bit uncomfortable with infinity and void as well. Not in a numerical sense (I don't run away screamign from calculus textbooks!) but in a "I want my life to fit within these neat constraints" sense. Every day I learn that things are a lot bigger than I am and that there's a whole bunch that is out of my control. There's seemingly infinite time ahead of me and a void filling it. I have no firm plans. My life is different than I expected it to be, in the best of ways. It should be a comfort to me to know a sovereign God who brought all of creation into being even though it started in chaos, but unfortunately I am not as trusting as I should be. I wish to arrange these things myself...but I can't.

Sorry, guess this post was a bit disjointed. My thinking's disjointed right now too. It's time for sleep.