To Learn, Perchance to Thrive

Yesterday was part of an epiphany. I realised I’m giving far too much importance to the location of the universities I’m looking at than I should. Yes, location is important, but relevant to the other factors I’ve been including, it doesn’t carry as much weight as might be intended.

As for today, I’m hoping for some similar epiphanies in the fields of academia.

The Julia-Mandelbrot Love Child

First and foremost I am a man of ideas. I have always been a man of ideas and I presume I shall always be a man of ideas. As such, I am of this nature easily inclined to fall in love with an idea, to infatuate myself in concepts and theories, to indulge in the orgasmic philosophies of imagination and the perpetuation of thought itself.

As such, I am also of the nature of put into things more thought than one might deem reasonable for the affair. I consider at length where I’ll spend my money, how I will spend it, and what will remain after it’s spent. I can spend days on end merely considering which movies, which books, which ideas I liked more than the last.

Take history. But two short years ago I was beginning college. I loved the idea of history, that ability to raise one’s eyebrows and make a well-informed comment upon how this has all happened before. Just look back in that year, at that place, at that one moment which parallels this, and you’ll see, very clearly, how we’ve just repeated our mistakes–for better or for worse I’d leave to the audience, but it’s only one such possible encounter with a historian.

Of course, but two short years ago, I was also beginning my first course in history. And I can assure you all, there was no delight in the act for the delight that mirrored the concept. I was bored. I sought answers and insight that did not exist in the text, that did not exist in the mindset of history. Though I still do love the idea of history, and of being historically knowledgeable, the study itself remains elusive, a passion I cannot hope to touch.

As a mathematician, I’m also exceedingly fond of tangents.

Heart and Sold

I believe.

A lie.

But philosophy’s abstract and some days you feel like hitting the ground hard. Today’s one of those days. I’m high in the sky but waiting to land, and although my mind’s awhirl with all sorts of things, I want to hold tightest to those I hold tightest to.

I fall in love easily. Beauty’s everywhere, and amid the myriad of pretty faces, there’s a wondrous soul sometimes. I find those people, and when I find them, I’m lucky. There aren’t enough of those anymore, at least anymore that my spyglass can show me, but they give me hope for humanity, hope for humankind. These good souls, these good men and good women, they’re our future.

And to them I’ve sold my heart.

They don’t realise this. They don’t realise that every time I say their happiness equals mine, that nothing in the world makes me happier than seeing those I love at their happiest, I’m not just saying words, I’m not just spewing niceties, I’m being honest. In truth, there’s a small number of people I’ve imprinted upon, those that to borrow the avian attachment rating, I’ve followed from birth. I haven’t known them all from birth, no, life’s not so easy, but our lives have been parallel in many ways nonetheless.

It always astounds me when I see how parallel we’ve been sometimes, how close we’ve come to pass so nearby, only to meet later on and not realise what fate had dealt us until our hand had been played and fate’s work had been done.

This closeness is spectral, spiritual, something else altogether. I like to think of these few as my soul mates, those whom God crafted with me in mind, whether literally or figuratively, those souls of his that all came from the same mold, or at the very least the same dye lot. We exist each on the same wavelength, the same frequency. How grand, how heart-stopping, it would be if each of us came together in one place, at one time, just to exist and to be. The world would stop for a moment, I’d swear to it. It’d stop for a moment and cease to be; and in its unfounded absence, it would be everything and nothing, Heaven and Earth all in one.

It is upon this feeble ground that the foundation of my beliefs lie. It is in my own selfishness that I hope and pray for the success and prosperity, the fortune and grace of these few friends that keep me eternally afloat. In my mind, if I believe that God has a plan, that for each of these men and women, all will work out for the best, I can have faith in anything. When I believe in their ultimate happiness, I can believe that the world is in order, and I can believe that right will be right and all wrongs, in time righted.

This foundation is faulted, however, and my belief in the Grand Happy Ending of the Universe is no more than a fairytale. I know it’s untrue. I’ve seen too many sad stories and had too many bad thoughts to think otherwise. But this I must believe, for without this core belief, my entire world falls apart. If I accept that in the end there is no happiness, then I lose my faith in God. If I accept that good things will not come to good people, my faith in justice is crippled. If I accept that horrible things can and will happen to my friends, and no good will come of it, my single source of sheer bliss is broken.

So I lie to myself. I convince myself on unfounded, assumed knowledge that good things happen to good people, that all wrongs that befall my friends will result in their ultimate betterment, and that in the end all will be happy, for everyone. And herein this balance of self-deception, I find God. I see God daily, in the minute and extraordinary processes of the world at large, the realisation that we’re looking light years into the past when we look at the stars, and suddenly the world is Right and Just and Merciful. I see the perfect language of math and science, and I believe this must be true for hearts and souls, too, for my friends and soul mates, too.

This delusion is my only vice, but my also my only savior. Without accepting this lie, this unconfirmed truth, this confirmed untruth, I lose all faith in the world and all faith in God, and when that light goes out, the world goes dark.

I’ve been in the dark before. I still see only a black void when I turn my eyes to that time. It’s not where I want to be. It’s not where I can be any longer. I know, if I ever go back there, it will be a journey from which I will never return.

Deception is truth.

I’ve taken my heart and I’ve sold it away. And should I ever get it back, should my happiness for a moment rest upon myself and not upon those of whom I’ve fallen in love, I fear I won’t be able to hold onto it any longer; I fear all the world will fall away from me then. I need each of them, more than they know it, and I hope, so fervently and fruitlessly, that they can take to heart these words of mine and take care to shield their hearts and hold themselves high, so I, too, can touch the sky beside them, forever more.

It’s Fractal Almost

Plinky says:

“Ten years from now, what do you hope your life will be like?”

I asked myself a similar question this last summer when I was Israel. We were in the Beit Knesset (that is to say, in the vulgar, the chapel) and I was looking up at the stained glass window, thinking of where life might take me.

It started with a seed–who I was and where I was.

Then it started to grow: A stem (where I’ve been) and branches (where I’d be going). As it grew onwards and upwards, the branches kept breaking and breaking apart more and more, each traveling about the same distance before it bifurcated itself into two more possible futures, almost as if the fractal tree that branches perpetually.

I still see that tree, but now it has many more branches.

Among them:

The Mathematician: Herein my education is straightforward. I graduate GTCC, get my Bachelor’s in Mathematics with teaching licensure, and then I get a job either at a high school or a middle school and teach children how to understand math. It’s a passion of mine, both mathematics and teaching, and in this branch I’m happy and enjoying life, perhaps not making six figures as someone once complimented me by saying he could foresee me doing such, but it’s still a good life. At some point I might return to school and get my Master’s or Doctorate and teach at the collegiate level (GTCC’s head of the math department has implied she’d love to see me take her place someday), but no matter which way the branch continues to grow, I’m always doing what I love.

The Rabbi: This branch puts me in one of two places, either here in America or back in Israel. In either scenario, I complete my Bachelor’s as before and then migrate back up north, where I attend the Jewish Theological Seminary in NYC where I’m later ordained as a rabbi of the Conservative movement. Then again this branch diverges once more, wherein some leaves take me back to teaching and others to a congregation and still more to the Committee of Jewish Law and Standards. It’s an odd bunch of branches, I’ll admit, but they’re a nice place to bathe in the sunshine of spirited possibilities.

The Politician: This branch is still a new bud, spawn of my time in Raleigh at the SLI and also the political rally I aforementioned attended. In either case, much like the others, I continue till I’ve achieved my Bachelor’s, and then while I teach for a bit (or perhaps after I’ve taught for a bit), I return to school to get my Associate’s in Political Science (since you don’t need any political training to be a politician, I could just jump off the bridge here, but I’m of the philosophy that if you’re going to do something, do it right, so I’d take the time to make myself properly acquainted with politics before making myself a so-called politician). From here, I’d run for office. Perhaps on a school board at first, perhaps straight to state congress, later on to Congress itself, then perhaps as far as the Presidency. That part’s debatable. In any case, I’d bring common sense and sensibility back to America, looking at the facts first, not the favors we’d be offered, and do what’s best for the nation, not what’s best for me. I’d lobby for intelligent functioning and equality for all. It’d be a good day in my country.

And the Writer: This one’s like a willow branch, long and slender and wispy like the wind. It flutters in and out, through the other branches, wherever life may take me, as I continue to write here–upon my blog–and elsewhere, stories and novels and many more things. Sometimes I get published upon this branch and make millions, sometimes only thousands, sometimes only a dedicated fanbase. But no matter where this thread of life goes, it’s always a part of where I am, always a part of who I am.

The sad part is that each of these branches lacks a little thing like a flower: They’re covered in leaves, but all trees have leaves, and mine is lacking some color. In all of these scenarios, I’m career-oriented and goal-driven (the picture of America right there), but I’m loveless and, if yet still happy, lonely. They forget to factor in the indiscernible future, the love interests and relationships, the man I’ll marry, the family we’ll have. And whereas I can’t see any of that, this tree is but a seed still and little more than that.

T-40

T minus 40 and suddenly the words are red before me. I don’t recall the substitution for i-cubed and no matter what I do, I have to get this problem right: It’s worth six points, a guaranteed B if I miss it.

I take a breath and flip over one of my scraps of paper and start writing:

cn=n
i=(n²+n)/2
i²=(2n³+3n²+n)/6
i³=(n⁴+     +n)/4

And here I freeze. I’m missing a term. I remember looking over the substitutions in my notes last night–God, why didn’t I take care to remember i-cubed?–and recall thinking, It’s a test. He can’t possibly do i-cubed, can he?

I close my eyes and try to recreate the page before me. Tentatively, I scribble in “3n²” and hold my breath.

It looks right, so I breathe a sigh of relief and continue.

I stop before I even start. The first term of my problem is i³/n³. If I try to substitute in (n⁴+3n²+n)/4, I’ll end up with n/4–and that’ll give me an infinite answer! And since the area bounded by x²=1, x=0, x=1, and the x-axis is most certainly not an infinite area, I’ve got it wrong again.

I take another deep breath and look over my work so far. I copied the function correctly. Delta-x is correct, too: (b-a)/n –> (1-0)/n = 1/n. Even M_i is correct! (a+i(delta-x) –> 0+i(1/n) = i/n)

So what am I doing wrong? Where have I made a mistake?

I keep looking. I have to go over everything twice before–BAM!–I suddenly realise what I did wrong: I substituted M_i instead of delta-x, and since i/n definitely does not equal 1/n, there–at last–is my error.

So I erase a couple terms and then rewrite them and finally end up with i-squared, whose substitution I easily recall, and within minutes, I’m done. (:

Now to await the results. And it’s T minus two days for that.

The End of the Decade

In this final look at the last decade, everything comes full circle and my tale is finally told.

2008: The year my life ended (and simultaneously began)

I graduated from high school in May. I’d been homeschooled my entire life, and ergo I was the valedictorian by default. I had to write my speech five times before I settled upon something worthwhile that I actually liked. I had a small ceremony, only my family and a couple of friends. That’s not to say my schooling was finished, however; on the contrary, I continued to study mathematics and now also Hebrew. My love of the latter kept me interested in the language of God, but it was my love of physics and my intention to major in the field upon starting college that made me know I had to understand mathematics to a degree I never had before. Unintentionally along the way, I began to enjoy applied mathematics, but decided I could never be a physicist: although I’d come to like math, I could never make it through calculus.

The day before my graduation ceremony, I had my confirmation, during which I read Torah and gave a speech about what being Jewish meant to me. It took five rewrites to find something that was personal enough to be meaningful but general enough to be understood by the masses. In the end, I said being Jewish meant teaching and learning from everyone. In a way, that’s still what it means to me, but it now means so much more than just that. Perhaps I’ll elaborate some day.

I participated in NaNoWriMo again this November, reaching conclusions I could only draw through my characters, but it was in October that my life ended and a new soul was born: I’d been torn in two for years, one half Jewish, the other half gay, and this year at Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement, the holiest day for all Jews—that chasm inside me was crushed and my two halves became whole in the most inharmonious collision at all possible. A gay Jew? It was unheard of—it simply could not exist! I stared toward the ark as the Torah was read, standing there, torn from God and sent asunder, and upon the parchment in my mind wrote the words of the day:

An abhorrence, you called it, this thing I call love
but you gave it to me, my creator
I stare at the gates as they swing shut above
I’ll repent for this sooner or later

I cried to sleep that night, when finally I was able to calm myself for sleep. But at the same time, the pain showed me the path to healing. I found people I could talk with, and I talked, and I researched, and I found patches to cover my wounds and strings with which to sew them shut. Not all the time could they keep the blood in, but no longer was the spiritual bleeding profuse. I could breathe again, and with every breath, I became closer the ultimate truth I now sought.

2009: The year that changed everything (for the last time)

I spent the early months of the year studying faith and facts, and through this I gained confidence in myself not only as a student of the sciences, but also as a budding scholar of Judaism. I became comfortable being gay and Jewish; I began coming out to more people, something I had never had the courage or the confidence to do beforehand. I was a new person, and would only continue to become newer as the year went on.

In April, for the first time in my life, I considered the prospect of becoming a rabbi. It had been suggested to me by both family and members of my congregation for as long as I could remember, but there was always something holding me back. Now that the chains had fallen, a doorway opened up to me, and a new path began. At the same time, in May, I wrote my first drash (commentary on the Torah) since my Bar Mitzvah seven years sooner.

In the summer I went to Israel on the Alexander Muss High School in Israel program. It helped me break out of my shell, become even more confident in myself; it taught my new ways to see the world, and for six short weeks I saw the glory of a world once only imagined. One of the scenes that stands out most: lying under the stars of the Negev, staring into the Milky Way, stuffy-nosed and sick from a newly discovered allergy to camels. Go figure. My luck.

I came back a better person, and no number of words will do it justice how much that trip changed me for the better and affected and influenced every second of my life thereafter.

Two weeks thereafter, in fact, I started college. I had great teachers, and I learned to appreciate history and sociology like never before, and I came to love math in ways I had never imagined possible. My love of math beforehand had been friendship at best; now it was intimacy. I changed my major from history and education to math and science education and Jewish studies. That defines me pretty well: the convergence of science and faith, teaching and learning.

That’s the definition of wolves, too: They’re savage in the face of danger, but similarly familial animals that teach their young with more love and compassion than some humans that I know of. They’re harbingers of dreams, guides in the astral plane. Likewise, I’m kindred to them. I’m a teacher, a guide, and family often means more to me than anything else in the world.

And I write. That’s altogether why I’m the Writingwolf. It’s in my blood. It’s who I am.

Some Years Change Everything

Sometimes the stars say it all, and sometimes they don’t. But when they do, how much I wish I could just look up past the endless smog and see all the answers I seek. If only it really were the destination, not the journey, that mattered. The world would be a much better place. Or perhaps, the world wouldn’t be much a place at all.

2004: The year that changed everything (the second time)

If one phrase could sum up this year sufficiently, it’d be family issues. My grandmother died. My parents split up. We had to put our dog to sleep. I was big on poetry at the time, and I recall writing in my room as I listened to the argument that ended everything: “I want to sleep but I can’t close my eyes / I want to feel whole but there’s nothing inside / I’m ten feet under covers but still I’m freezing cold / I’m petrified in silence and there’s nothing I can hold.”

We had to move that year. I packed up my journal and said goodbye to the wild.

2005: The year that changed everything (for the third time)

I still wore the mask of a Jew, and being as that I could not bring myself to confess my conflicts of religion, I became a volunteer with my synagogue’s Hebrew school when my mother prompted me to do so. I skipped out on my first day and talked the whole two hours with a friend of mine from my own days in Hebrew school, but the second day I was there, I fell in love. I worked with two great teachers that year and became friends with each of the six third- and fourth-graders that I worked with as madrich (teacher’s aid), helping keep the children in line and do errands as needed. Most of all I began to notice another world of Judaism that I’d not known of nor been exposed to as a pre-adolescent child. As this new world opened up around me, I was slowly reabsorbed into the faith I had thought lost forever. A new Jew was born.

That year I also began attending our local Hebrew High School, and there was one student that captured my heart in a way I hadn’t know it could be captured. All my life I’d thought I’d have a wife and had explained away my lack of interest in girls with the saying that I just hadn’t met the right one yet, and then I met him. Single-handedly, he changed my life; with a handshake, he captured my heart forever.

Confusion was my first response. All the rest was summed up with the words “cherry blossom death.”

Those are vague, and I intend them to be. No one quite realizes how personal sexuality is, but also no one quite realizes how much it is a part of someone’s life and a part of their entire being, not just their sexual endeavors. In fact, sexuality is a misnomer, because it isn’t about sex. It’s about companionship, it’s about love, it’s about romance and intimacy. The story of my coming out to myself is a story all it’s own, but here it should be known that the journey was as important as the destination, that the end itself was a part of the means, and that the end and the journey are now synonymous as I continue forward in my own life, facing all the struggles of being gay, and being Jewish, and the unique challenges presented to me by being both. It’s an integral part of who I am, and much like at the dawn of  mathematics when no one could imagine what integrals were, and probably would have dismissed them if they had been told, my reaction to this integral part of me was much the same: It had always there, but I hadn’t always known it, and that was the challenge I was now meant to face.

Where in all this does the phrase “cherry blossom death” fit? Squarely in the middle, but as I’ve said, that’s a story for another day, and with only four years of the last decade left, that’s a story that will simply have to wait for another, later date to be told.