This morning when I woke up my hand already was cramping. Late nights spent writing,calculating, recalculating and rewriting assignments have left me slightly exhausted to say the least. These days I find that I am learning so much stuff that I find it hard to find time to think for myself.

At night when I am tired and confused about what I am learning. I stare at my pen, the page, and the table and think, “What are these atoms that I am learning about?” These things that we see all the time and yet never really “see”? How many things out there exist that we cannot see? What really is this thing called seeing?

There is something scary/wonderful about learning in that it lets you see things in a new light. It lets you appreciate things that you take for granted in new ways. Science itself pieces together the fragments that we do know (or at least that we think we do know) and brings them together to explain. And while no theory is every complete or entirely correct, it is amazing that a theory can explain things at all.

Pick up something sitting close to you, a pen perhaps and drop it. Drop it again. How terribly exciting: it falls, nothing new. However, how much do we actually know about the pen falling? If you think/learn about the physics behind the pen falling you find something beautiful. The fact that something as natural as a falling pen can be explained using a simple equation is incredible. Falling, as we know it is measurable to some extent. The pen accelerates down at ~9.82 m/s^2. That means every second it’s velocity increases by 9.82m/s, forming a parabola if you take consecutive pictures. If we don’t know much about physics all we see is a pen falling in a straight line downwards. But if we do know a bit, even just a tiny bit then we can “see” something quite different.

But there are some things about explaining that I do not like. Explaining the world around us in terms of science leaves very little for the explanations of the self. Through science people can be explained as bundles of organs, cells, chemicals. We can comfort ourselves in thinking that things are systems that can be explained rather than complete mysteries that enshroud us. People can become subjects, animals can be tested, brains can be picked apart, with time things can be dissected. These thoughts leave part of me empty, they seem to take away some of the awe in the world. Maybe there is comfort in not knowing things. Such as what makes things right. What makes things wrong? What is love, what are feelings? Wy do we keep pushing and pulling. And why of all things do our hearts keep on beating?

Perhaps a pen on paper will never be truly explain the nature of things. And while science powers on, while science attempts to gain insight on things, perhaps sometimes it is nice to have things that we do not understand. Sometimes, maybe the self is created by the things that we do not know.

I do write on recycled paper, but the amount of paper that I am going through for my Math and Physics classes is making me sick. I really need to invest in a miniature white board and a miniature marker to do my practice problems on… but then again I am left handed so that wouldn’t really work. Technically I could invest in a whiteboard and learn to write in mirror writing… but then doing problems would just get even more difficult. And I could write notes on my computer, but I can’t learn that way!!!

Just for entertainment here are some other uses for my notebooks:

This is what I learn in Psychology

This is what happens in Math.

More computer science... very important information..."No wait, is it data?"

I don’t doodle in Physics.

Chemistry is mainly drawing anyways…

Who knew that silly-absent-minded-doodling skills would get so much rehearsal at University?

So far on notebook use these are the stats:

Physics: 2, 80 page notebooks and halfway through a ~250 page notebook

Math: 1, 80 page notebook and slightly more than halfway through a ~250 page notebook

Chemistry: 1.5 80 page notebooks +CHIRP

Computer Science: 1 80 page notebook but a huge amount of space on my hard drive (my computer is not very happy)

Psych: not even one notebook!!!

For the last few years ( I took two gap years before coming to UBC) I have been working as a high school Math tutor… not because I am particularly astounding at Math, but because under the circumstances it is a flexible job, there is a lot of demand and I somehow manage to do a good job of turning C and below students into A students. I don’t think it is necessarily a job that you need to have a degree to teach with.  While I know next to nothing about higher level Mathematics, I have completed grade 12 and that seems to be sufficient enough to teach it well. Depressingly I often see signs up for tutors who have degrees, even masters who charge about the same amount per hour. It makes me feel like even if I spend my next billion years in school, $30 per hour is probably the most I will ever be paid in my life…

Anyways in trying to explain sinusoidal functions and trig e.t.c. you come across a whole bunch of the ferris/bicycle/ anything wheel problems. That got me wondering about what would happen if you put a point on the base of a cylinder and rolled it along a plane. What shape would you get? My little brain can’t quite figure this sort of thing out on it’s own… So I decided to do my own little experiment to find out. I found a shot glass, taped a piece of pencil lead into the inside edge and rolled it along an old book. It turns out that you actually get semicircular shapes with a period of 2*pi*r… hmm not what I thought, but also not very exciting. Then I wondered what would happen if you rolled the shot glass around another shot glass of the same size. That was a little more interesting! The shape was somewhat like a circle but with an indent. I recognized the shape as being the main one in the Mandelbrot set. I wasn’t entirely sure though, so I went to check if it was the same shape on Wikipedia. Yes it was!!! Amazed by my discovery I started reading the article in a little more depth. Unfortunately upon reading the byline I found out that the shape already had a name: a cardioid and people had known about it hundreds of years ago.  And yes, they made it exactly the same way I did (ok perhaps minus the shot glasses) and there is a billion different wikipedia articles on pretty much every shape you could imagine… Don’t you just hate it when you figure something out, only to learn that in fact it is nothing new?

It seems to me that because we are essentially taught how to think, that we follow the same patterns over and over again. It seems like learning is just building upon those thought patterns that already have been established. And yet so many different thought patterns and things exist that a human lifetime is barely enough to understand anything at all. Sometimes I feel like we are only limited by what we already know. If we can go infinitely small and if we can go infinitely large, perhaps the smallest thing is also the greatest. <3

There seems to always be long list of things to do, people to see, places to go. Some how no matter how many lines that I cross off each day, new ones appear, a process that repeats itself day after day, year after year. And then the split second I find myself with absolutely nothing to do (or nothing that I can motivate myself to do), I get frustrated and feel like I never have and never will achieve anything in my life. Ah, all the faults with all or nothing thinking!!!

Walking through the courtyard in front of the Irving K. Barber library tonight got me thinking. It is always quiet in the summer evenings, peaceful even. Yet I can never shake off the idea that there is something eerie about the way the trees are all planted in perfect rows. Perfectly aligned they remind me of students, or perhaps society. The way in which we are all cultivated to grow in a certain way, in the precise spot we were involuntarily placed. We can never truly escape our roots, they grip us, hold us down to the ground. They are our lifeline. Even if we try to grow as tall as can be, we are human and therefore bound by our humanity.
I wonder if the people who planted those trees ever thought much about the pattern that they were placed in? And what that pattern would represent to the students who trudge past them day by day. For one thing I know that I would really like to see a little tree in there, one that doesn’t follow the grid pattern. I don’t know why exactly I would like to see that little tree, but I think that it would signify hope. That no matter where you are planted, you can still live, breathe and grow. <3