To Dress A Mathematician

In all honesty, I'm not sure whether I'm going for a To Kill A Mockingbird thing there, in which case I'm implying that dressing a mathematician is a sin, or perhaps it's a Batman Begins affair, in which case one has to become a mathematician to conquer the inordinate challenge of dressing one of them.

Insanity aside, the title refers to JJ's seemingly impossible task today, as we went to Leamington on a mission to take out the renegade Lieutenant Fashion Sense, first name Lack Of. My mother will vouch that this has always been a difficult and sometimes harrowing endeavour, and she had given up on dressing me by the time I hit adult size shoes. JJ, however, did manage to find a few items that suited me, but they, amazingly, weren't trench coats or Converse. What with that and going to a club last night, I figure I may start accidentally blending into society.

Fortunately, however, I did turn down burger at the club – yep, that's how good Kasbah is, they had a barbecue type affair in the smoking area – because I'm currently vegetarian. I don't think I've mentioned that, but I am now one with that freaky tribe of people. I should probably stop offending them, but I attack maths students and mock men of my height for being short, so I wouldn't want to give the environmentally benevolent herbivores any preferential treatment.

Moreover, to counteract no longer appearing to be a science fiction character all of the time – The Doctor, Darth Vader, Captain Jack Harkness, Captain Malcolm Reynolds, Dr Emmett Brown and Batman all wear particularly long coats, or, you know, capes – I'm writing a blog post declaring my love for looking like a pillock.

The nonconformity balance is restored.

Yoghurt Pots and String

I think creativity is the tonic of life.

Right now, I should probably be doing work. I get plenty of it. That's not stimulating, though. The end result of a maths assignment is far from new, and undoubtedly not unique due to a count upwards of 300 fellow students who also have to do said work. It's not part of my design, and, besides, who ever enjoyed being told what to do?

I'm not doing work; I'm writing this. It's hardly a short story, or a canvas painting, but it's certainly a start. Really, right now, and at any given time, I simply want to write, paint, sketch, speak, design, build, engineer, play, invent.

Perhaps I played with Lego too much as a kid, and spent way too much time improvising on piano instead of actually learning the boring ABRSM exam pieces.

I like to think of creativity as the most socially acceptable form of nonconformism. Aside from writing, composing, inventing or the like, breaking societal conventions tends to result in being branded things like "kleptomaniac," "nymphomaniac," or, if you're really messed up, "pyromaniac." I can't get arrested for writing a blog... erm... so long as I'm nice about the US Government. You guys rock.

I planned on keeping this post both shorter and with much less self-imposed gravitas and philosophical undertones than my last post, about The Hollow Men. I'll likely go into the kitchen now and make a cardboard box into some kind of dinosaur.

Between the idea and the reality

I'm at University now. I thought I'd mention that for those you who don't know me, or who haven't been paying attention. Now that everyone's on the same page, I'll begin.

The seriously sharp amongst will have noticed The Hollow Men has crept its way into my title. I love that poem. Eliot is brilliant in general - without him there'd be no Cats, and that would be a travesty.

The Hollow Men is a truly beautiful piece, all about the nature of disappointment. More specifically, it deals with the inevitability of disappointment. When it's not being ironic, the phrase "that's the way I want to go," ordinarily applies to drifting off peacefully in one's sleep. Irvine Welsh thinks otherwise. Choosing life is akin to choosing "rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home." In the end, though, it's likely that the vast majority of us will die in a hospital ward, low on relatives and without any recollection of events from our last twenty years of life. Medicine is likely to advance far enough to eliminate all but a handful of diseases, car safety will improve exponentially and violent crime is forever on its way out, so the odds of living long past the onset of senility is practically an inevitability for anyone who really wants that. So, it follows thus, we will all end, "not with a bang, but a whimper."

How disappointing is that? Realistically, the death of Thorin Oakenshield is what most people would desire. To have that final victory, that ultimate battle, to win it all, then just leave one's corporeality. It's not quite a bang, but it's far from a whimper. The alternative is to perish in battle, but that is disappointing, too. Granted, it's a bang, but dying halfway through the story, with no epilogue, it's almost, but not quite, as unsatisfying as dying years later, the last remnant of your own forgotten tale.

If I can return to my original point after that pseudo-digression, The Hollow Men deals with the dissatisfaction that every man feels when his idea becomes reality. On a side note, wherever I use a gender specific noun, just read it as the other gender or your favourite non-gender specific equivalent if you're the kind of person to take offence. Back to the point, now that nobody is taking offence from stylistic choices, I can't remember ever imagining something perfectly. I'm often quite close, but the accuracy of the my approximation correlates to the relevance of my past experience. I can imagine a future train journey very well if I know the train, the line, the time of day, who the passengers will be, whether or not I've already read the book with which I'd occupy myself and so on. In the case of University, I had absolutely no idea.

In terms of academic content, I had a better idea than most. Wikipedia, the Open University and the odd visit, for one reason or another, to Newcastle University all gave me an insight into the vast difference between school and this place. The disparity between teaching at schools and learning at University was more of a shock to some than to myself, given that circumstances necessitated my self-teaching onwards from at least five years ago. Even before that, I knew above and beyond the scope of the curriculum by virtue of curiosity, an ability to read, and access to far too many encyclopaedias, atlases, poor excuses for newspapers and very few channels that weren't BBC. Enough autocentricism for now, academia is less than half of the University experience. For some, it counts for closer to zero.

The next most obvious consequence of conscripting oneself to the West Midlands for four years is that, if they're fortunate, your family doesn't live there. This came as no surprise. I was every bit as callous about the lack of brothers and sisters and, for that matter, a mother as I expected to be. Anyone who actually knows me will know just how much I love being one of the five, but I can do that from afar. Perhaps I would have found it more difficult if I were the first to flee the nest, but, as it happens, I am the middle child and the second to put down hooks outside the Northeast. Again, my mother makes it easier. I love that woman, though I never tell her, but living with her isn't half difficult. She does do my laundry, though, and thus I regularly make infrequent trips to the launderette here. It's 100 metres away, and in the opposite direction to everything else in the 'verse, given that the only entrance to this glorified Travelodge is at the opposite end of its grassy courtyard to the launderette. As such, I've been of my own accord less than three times, and that condition satisfied by a margin of at least two. I never expected to do much laundry, so as of yet, I'm yet to mention a condition of this bubble onto which the shadow falls between the motion and the act.

If you've not read The Hollow Men, you probably missed three obscure metaphors by now. Go read it, come back. Done that? Good. Yes, I know, it was in Apocalypse Now. So was I Can't Get No Satisfaction, but they don't mention that every time it plays on Radio 2.

The real shadow, the headpiece filled with straw, the discrepancy between essence and the descent, is the people. Unlike trains or launderettes, people are intrinsically different. A train goes choo, and a washing machine whirrs, but a person can make those noises and so many more. "Thanks, Captain Obvious," some of you say. "Nice way of putting it," say others. "Stop with the quotes," go yet another set. That's exactly the point. You load up a washing machine, bit of soap powder, hit the button and it washes your clothes. So I'm told. As far as people are concerned, there is no right way through clothes at them. For washing machines, there's no wrong way. That's what it does. I can generalise about washing machines; they don't take offence. People revel in their differences, and I can't even make comments about all of a single group without someone piping up in protest. I'm not complaining either. Quite frankly, people make life worth living. Not even trains do that, and I bloody love trains.

I've met a whole load of people in my life. A whole load - still with the washing machine lexicon, I see. Sorry about that. Nonetheless, just as I based my expectation of mathematics on what I'd seen earlier, I based my entire expectation of who I'd meet, greet, eat, beat, sheet, neat, hang on, the list stopped working. I based my expectation of what people would be likely upon some biased concatenation of every personality I'd ever encountered. That's a lot of personalities. Ordinarily, taking that much information, adjusting it for inflation, dividing by the square of the speed of light and then taking logs would usually yield at least some approximations worth their weight. In this case, no amount of calculating gave me anything like a glimpse at the nature of the people here.

It's almost as though nobody I ever met had anything besides anatomy and culture in common with everybody I've met since. It's terrifying and enlightening, seeing so many new combinations of little idiosyncrasies, culminating in a plethora of personalities, none of which are anything like any conception of my mind. From an existentialist point of view, there's no greater argument against being simply a brain in a jar. My subconscious is incredible: my conscious is an abacus next to its DeepThought, but it would take a machine infinitely more complex to simulate just a handful of us luminous beings. Not this crude matter at all.

Nonetheless, the horror of surprise created by twenty-two-thousand unfamiliar characters pales into insignificance under the right light. That light, to me, is the future. It counts for nothing, making every last one of these beautiful amalgamations appear in an instant, since time - the destroyer of minds, men and mountains - will vanish them all in due course. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

I, January

Christmas has its merits, but the novelty wore off a long time ago. Fairytale of New York's melancholy euphony will never get old, but tacky trees and unashamedly crass television lost its appeal years ago, if it ever had any.

Where Christmas is the fever, January is the prescription. It is the phoenix from the flames. It is the silent guardian of hopes and dreams. Aside from ending wars of mass-participation, New Year is the only chance humanity gets to share a clean slate. "Oh, that was last year," is a tonic that makes any unsavoury act that little bit less distasteful.

In January, anything goes. Trying something new becomes effortless, and sticking with the old becomes nostalgic. Despite what Wizzard might have said, Christmas never reinvents for January the lingering hope for unending festivity like summer imposes on September. The Christmas period is well-defined as the time ending at New Year and beginning in the middle of September when Asda is finished with it's "School's Back" decorations and knows that Hallowe'en just isn't big enough to fill its stores. That level of dragging out is more than summer usually gets anyway, and with torrents of rain in place of sun, sea and sand.

January's charm is aided by its lack of eternal life. December rears its ugly head in ever other "-ember," but the bringer of new opportunities, the laid-back, laissez-faire beauty known as January simply bides its time, revealing itself at the end of the show, like Shirley Bassey's money-note or a magician's second budgie.