brace for impact god knows i'm in no position to judge anybody on their life decisions maybe i'm wrong maybe she does feel the unbearable weight of having two lives in her hands maybe it's better that she doesn't maybe everyone wings it anyway maybe... parenthood is like mortality and requires a certain amount of numbness to the concept i don't know, i know less every day i told my friend in germany that i'm starting to enjoy mathematics for the first time i used to hate it, passionately i couldn't understand the change of heart he helped me figure it out berlin is mostly liberal, left i asked him what that's like (he grew up in Egypt, and he understood what I was asking :) ) i've only recently realized that kind of society is beyond my imagination i asked feminists here, what they imagine they'd be like if the world were truly egalitarian most of them didn't know how to answer so much of their identities, so much of my identity is tied to pushing back, back to my friend in germany-- he said, the questions are different, the questions are harder he said moving from cairo to berlin was like first living in a sealed coffin and then finding yourself afloat in space i said it seems like two very different versions of the same loneliness he agreed and laughed because im funny/lack the gravitas to land statements like that with my fat asian baby face i asked him what kind of questions he asks now and i discovered that i was lucky (?) enough to have been exposed to his new questions at a younger age i had a liberal arts education and unconventional friends im already afloat in space and im also in the sealed coffin which i think is why math seems quaint now it was only daunting when i was afraid to be wrong in my horrible strict british school where you could get demerits for looking at somebody the wrong way and bring shame upon your house (yes, those exist outside of harry potter) my house was the worst of the four in our school, i should've found that liberating i didn't stupid effective house system the point is as soon as i could, i avoided questions where i could be wrong for a very long time and now linear algebra is strangely reassuring and it's fun to think about a feigenbaum constant and neatly packaged chaos because it hurts to think about the children upstairs and it hurts to think about people in general |