magistrate

I have this memory from when I was a much younger magi. It was some school night, and my brother – two years older than me – was working through some math homework; probably very early algebra. I was curious and bounded over to see, and the problem was something very simple like a + 5 = 13, asking to solve for a.

I, with the assurance of an intelligent child who had not yet learned that being confidently wrong feels exactly like being correct, said "Oh, I know this! a is the first letter of the alphabet, so it has to be 1. So a plus 5... wait, that doesn't work!"

Either my mother or my brother then explained to me the concept of variables.

I immediately went "But if it can mean anything, then you never know anything!"

I was a child.

Later on, algebra turned out to be a subject I really enjoyed. It was just all puzzles! And calculus was also great, because it was just all advanced puzzles! (Geometry, I hated. It was just all proofs. But that's neither here nor there.) I don't remember the moment when that absolute incomprehension turned into clarity, but there had to have been n>0 of those moments somewhere.

I feel like I'm having a similar experience with Buddhist philosophy, of all things, right now.

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There was a meme going around a while back where people could ask for three things to ramble about which they might or might not know or care anything about. And I asked for three things, thinking that this was a thing I might conceivably be able to do.

WELL, NOW I'M DOING IT.

Courtesy of sholio...


1. Snow

Snow is very pretty right after it's fallen, but it does not love you.

I grew up in the Midwest, and I feel like I have some good memories of running around in the snow in those ridiculous puffy snow pants and insulated boots and a million layers of everything, and then coming back inside where it was warm and where mom had put towels in the dryer so they would be all heated up and fluffy for me to dry off with, and then we had hot chocolate or spiced cider (usually from those little packets) or something.

That childlike enjoyment is pretty much the total of my good feelings about snow. All the rest of it is shoveling driveways and scraping off cars and those days in the middle of winter when the universe has dumped a foot and a half of snow on everything and you've shoveled the walk like a dutiful citizen and then it gets above freezing during the day so the snow starts to melt and then it freezes again overnight so that all the meltwater solidifies into ice all over the sidewalks and then morning comes around and you have to walk to class but the entire city has turned into an ICY DEATH TRAP.

And then I moved to California, to a place where the winter temperature never drops below 40 (and if it does, the entire city thinks it's the end times), and I can rest assured that if ever a single snowflake is seen, the city will shut down, and I won't have to go to work.

Everywhere here still decorates their businesses with snowflakes and snowmen in the winter, though, which I find HILARIOUS.


2. The Telegraph

The most interesting thing I know about the telegraph is its role in a trans-atlantic police chase in 1910. Beyond that, now that I'm neck-deep in this RDR2 fic (taking place in an alternate 1907), I'm having fun working out how telegrams and trains affect the logistics of characters in three or four different places trying to communicate and keep each other updated on things. The pace of life in that era, from all my desultory and non-scholarly readings, is such a weird mix of delays much longer than we're accustomed to thinking of and rapid interconnection that completely upended society's ideas of time and distance.

Beyond that, Oakland and Berkley share a street called Telegraph Avenue, and San Francisco has a hill/neighborhood called Telegraph Hill, and it's a neat little intrusion of history into geography. As are so many things.


3. Sharks

Here's something I've been wondering about for a while: are sharks just extremely bad at digesting things? I ask because there seem to be more stories than one would expect about sharks eating some kind of evidence and then later being caught and cut open or vomiting up the evidence, with the evidence still intact enough to be used as evidence. The papers I can kinda understand – I don't know how well I would digest paper, either – but the human arm is meat, and you'd expect a shark to be pretty okay at breaking that down.

I'm not particularly afraid of sharks, because despite living in a coastal city I generally stay far away from their habitat, and if I did find myself in their habitat, I imagine my immediate concerns would skew more toward "hypothermia" and "drowning".



And there are my answers! If you would like me to give you three things to ramble about, feel free to leave a comment, and we'll see if I remember to respond.