Mischoola

I'm starting to get settled into a routine, which means I'm starting to feel 'at home' here in Missoula.  The strange new housing digs are feeling less bizarre, more comforting, and I'm even getting used to the smell of stale cat piss.  While this may not be a good thing to start getting used to, it's a positive experience.  By living in a house that's exact the opposite of the Greenhouse, and giving it a genuine chance, I've learned some valuable things about myself.  For example, I now know that if I'm going to live in a city, I want to live in the city and not out on the outskirts where you can pretend like everything around doesn't exit.   I'd like to live in a house that's a little bit more like a family or small community.  Everyone I live with, myself included, holes up in their room every evening, when we could be sitting together in the living room, jamming out to sick tunes and discussing the trivialities of our daily lives.  No, instead we shack up with ourselves and let maths, cable tvs, and computers consume our lives. Also, I realize I don't like locked doors, especially when everyone is home.  I'll concede that it does prevent people from walking in, but it also gives me a little feeling of entrapment.  Why lock the doors when we're all home?  We have 3 dogs, four cats, and 5 people living here, for Pete's sake!  Locked doors mean your homies can't walk in unannounced with a twelve pack of the High Life in bottles and say, "Whoo-Buddy, have I got a story for you!"  Who wants to live a life without that possibility?  Now, I recognize that it sounds like I'm complaining about my current digs.  I'm not.  Or at least, I don't think I am.  I do enjoy living here, especially because it's my home now.  It's cooky, just like those kids for CocoPuffs, it's non-ideal for me, but it's totally rad in its own way.  Marcy, my "young elderly" landlady/housemate, is one of the most generous people I've met.  She brings a diabetic, disabled Vietnam vet food every week or so with no compensation because he doesn't have any money, or any way to get to the store.  She brought dinner home for everyone in the house, including ice cream for dessert!  She spoils Roger like a grandma spoils her grandchildren.  While there are massive age, interest, and lifestyle differences between us, she is one of the nicest, most caring people I've ever met, and I can definitely learn some stuff from her.  Also, the house is really quite, which is great for doing math most of the time.  Nobody that lives here parties (at the house at least), so there will never be an instance of someone coming home wasted at 3:30 in the morning blasting N.W.A, Primus, and Rage Against the Machine from the massive stereo system in the living room because they're pissed about blowing it with some chick at the bar...  Those sorts of experiences will be missed in a mixture of happiness and nostalgia.  But, enough about the home life, and onto new developments in my professional life!

About three weeks ago, my official graduate student/teaching assistance duties began with a half week long orientation.  During that time, the new grad students got to know each other, the campus, and the faculty a tiny bit.  There's quite a mixture of people coming into the grad program here in the Maths. Dept; this isn't a Ph.D. Farm like the big schools (Berkeley, MIT, UW-Madison, etc.).  No, our of the seven incoming students, four enrolled in the Masters program, and 3 into the Ph.D.  Going the masters program, we have a young quirky Japansese man named Taki, and 3 young Americans (Conner, Jesse, and Adam, I think) who recently finished their Bachelors.  Going into the Ph.D program we have Nick, a man who just finished getting his Masters and doing some teaching in the Berkeley and Oakland area, Steve (I think that's his name), who was a well-respected neurosurgeon in town.  Steve was in a bad car accident in which his son was killed, and had a life changing experience.  It seems like almost out of nowhere, he decided he wanted to become a mathematician, so he stop cutting into people brains, and enrolled in the Ph.D. program at a ripe old age.  More power to Steve, this math is hard for me, and I haven't take any time off!  But during our orientation, we basically familiarized ourselves with our programs, got a whole mess of keys, and were repeatedly told:  "DON'T SLEEP WITH YOUR STUDENTS."  That was the main point, actually, I'm pretty sure.  We also discussed class enrollment with our newly assigned advisers, talked about possible research areas, and received our teaching assignments.  Thus far, I think I'm going to go into Topology.  It's tough to say with any certainty, but Topology was probably my favorite class as an undergrad, so that seems like a good direction to go in.  There's only one topologist here, Eric Chesebro, so he's my adviser for now.  Teaching wise, somewhat luckily, I don't have to teach a stand alone class.  I say 'somewhat luckily' because they announced teaching assignments 4 days before classes started, and getting a lesson plan together and figuring all that sort of crap out while getting used to graduate class would have been intense.  I'd like to teach a stand alone class soon, maybe probably next year.  Instead, I teach three "math labs" or recitation sections for a class called Probability and Linear Mathematics, which basically goes from lines, to systems of equations, to some basic linear algebra and linear programming, to basic set theory and counting principles, to probability, and finishes with Markov Chains.  Being a grad student is strange, because you only have three or so classes (as a TA you gotta take at least nine credits worth of class), but each of them has the possibility to be super strenuous.  Right now I'm taking topology, advanced abstract algebra 1 (Galois Theory and Sylow Theorems), and combinatorics 1.  I'm attending an Algebraic Geometry seminar, but not enrolled, since I know absolutely nothing about the topic.  I photocopied the first few pages of the book, and it's intimidating already - it doesn't fuck around at all  Here's a link to the Google Books copy if you want to check it out.  Interestingly enough, I won't have any in class tests in any classes, just homework, maybe a quiz here and there, and potentially a take home test or two.  The Topology class I'm taking is being taught with the Moore method, which means that the professor doesn't do any lecturing, he gives us a list of necessary definitions and theorems, the students try to prove the theorems, present proofs to the class, and get a lot of constructive criticism from colleagues and the prof.  It's interesting because we're starting super foundationally (I guess to provide the motivations for topology), and proving things like "A countable union of countable sets is countable," and "There is no surjection from a set A onto its power set." i.e. we're proving that there are infinitely many cardinality and building "Cantor's Paradise" ourselves.  Dope-ass-shit, if you ask me, but the Moore method results in slower paces, quantity of theorem wise, but a more in-depth understanding of the topic as a whole.  But yeah, so far the school aspect is super legit.  I'm psyched.

I've been going to the bouldering cave in the student rec center pretty regularly to get some exercise in the middle of the day, and had a conversation with a new grad student in the English Dept.  He mentioned how stoked he was about getting paid to use his brain for the first time.  I hadn't thought about it in that way before:  the school's paying me to teach because they think I'm knowledgeable enough to do so, and they're also paying me to take math classes because they think I can do that too!  I'm getting paid to do math - how rad is that?  Well, a lot of people wouldn't find that too rad, but for me, it's stellar.  Sometimes I get to feeling a little nostalgic for 'the good old days' when I could easily go out to Mia's on a Thursday night, drink a bunch of Pabst, and go to class the next day without worrying too much about getting homework done or anything like that.   Now, I've essentially reserved weeknights for math homework, and its awesome.  I'm reading G.H. Hardy's "A Mathematicians Apology" on the side right now, and a quote from it really inspired me:

"If a man is in any sense a real mathematician, then it is a hundred to one that his mathematics will be far better than anything else he can do, and that he would be silly if he surrendered any decent opportunity of exercising his one talent in order to do undistinguished work in other fields."

I got into grad school, so there must be some sense in which I might be a "real mathematician," and this little quote made me realize that its time to sorta harden the fuck up and get down and dirty with math.  Its time to take it really seriously and fully commit to it and see if I can reach my 'full potential,' whatever that may be.

(here's a nice little photo of my new school.  The math building is just outside of the right side of the frame.)

From my rant above about my newfound commitment to math, you might imagine that that cuts into the amount of other stuff I can do. And you're totally right.  I don't really have the time to go shredding three or five, but I think I'll be able to go once or twice a week.  Thus, Roger and I have been getting out to do some exploring around the Missoula area.  The second ride I went on here went to the top of the mountain behind the University (it's way higher up than the M).  The ride was pretty non-technical, but the descent was super fast, flowy, and fun.  Here are some photos from that outing.

(alright, this is from my first ride in the Rattlesnake area, but still kinda cool)

(a fire started off in the one of the canyons around and filled the valley with smoke)

(A bigger mountain, but the trail is closed to bikes)

(our house is off in the distance, on the left side of the frame somewhere)

(the clark fork, and the north edge of campus, the mountains here are steep!)

We also went on a stellar hike, and were introduced to sorta how wildernessy and remote Montana can get.  Just to get to the trailhead, we drove 10 minutes down a freeway, 20 minutes down a state high way, then 25 miles up dirt roads.  The hike to Boulder Lake was only five miles each way, after all that driving, but it was incredible.  Beautiful scenery, pristine lake, no people, lots of wild life, tons of huckleberries... And water!  It's nice to actually be around water, it seems like a luxury after living in AZ for so long.  Check the photos:

(the hike was weird, it would go through a burned section, into a clear cut section, then into a healthy section of forest)

(you can actually see the clear-cut line here, kinda shitty.  The logging company did replant a bunch of trees though)

(I kinda wish I rode my bike and poached the wilderness)

(from the top of Boulder Point, I gotta go check out those mountains)

(boulder lake and point)

(someone tried to tell me that huckleberries and blueberries are the same thing.  false.)

(too many colors)

(this is how my Course Coordinator wanted me to take attendance, I switched)

Let's see, outside of school and hiking, I haven't been up to too much else.  The weekend before school started I saw Igor and the Red Elvises play.  If you haven't heard them, you should look into it.  It's a Siberian/Soviet Blok Surf Rock Band, and they put on a great show.  I met a dude name Dave who worked for a gold company, exploring for new places to mine off near the Idaho border.  He told me a story about sitting at the VFW (the only bar in the town he lives in) with a bunch of good 'ol Montana rancher boys.  They saw something chasing a herd of elk or deer, and someone screamed "That's a wolf - get your guns!" So this possee ran to their 1989 Ford f-350s, got their rifles, and started unloading rounds at this wolf from the porch of the VFW.  In a sudden moment of clarity, one of the ranchers called "Stop shooting, that's Bill's dog, Sadie!"  They stopped, put their guns away, and let Sadie chase the elk, but didn't feel bad at all about nearly killing their buddies dog.  Now note that there was a Hemp Festival in downtown Missoula this weekend.  These sorts of 'cultural contradictions' are everywhere in Montana, and I love the clash.