“Thirty-seven years. Not good.” That was the response of my undergraduate research advisor, a senior Russian, to the ingenuous questions I posed, "Did you live in the Soviet Union for a long time? Do you have a generally positive or negative impression?”
The water kettle was taking a long time to heat the water; some silence took place as I sat back in an office chair, holding a small plate of lemon cake, waiting to make my coffee, waiting for him to continue talking. By the third bite, he began chattering about how strict and severe everything used to be and how censorship affected everyday life. The lack of different opinions, especially in school, was evident in subjects like history, geography, and economics, where there was never any room for discussions about the doctrine. This was always a big issue for him, who felt that in public spaces, you had to be just as communist as everyone else to not feel repression. “The manager says, and the idiot listens” was how he translated a popular expression of the time, in his soft-spoken manner, as he explained how sometimes opportunities in a factory were given to the most devoted communist, not the best worker. The story he told as an example was of a friend of his, a great programmer who was promoted to chief programmer only after a “small revolution” made by his colleagues. They believed him to be the obvious best option for the job, instead of the selected guy, a more dedicated party member. The right expression, I think, is “Я - начальник, ты - дурак [I’m the boss, you’re an idiot]," as far as my lazy research went. That’s something we had a good laugh about.
Then after stirring the spoon enough, dissolved in my recently grabbed cup of hot water was the soluble coffee and beside a nearby table was the empty cake plate when something complimentary by him was said. The compliment went to the Soviet education, which I can’t put into doubt, as there’s no better “output” than him, but his praise was followed by some sort of admission, “It was only good because it mattered for military development,” an admission that felt like a sour remark, a product of a bittersweet memory. To my surprise, the best years for him [at least in terms of freedom] were the years around 1987, when perestroika was an ongoing reform. Those last years preceding the fall of the Soviet regime, which I had read so much about while making my way through the last chapters of Socialism Betrayed, were not spoken of in terms of the economic crisis of the period but in terms of the increasing freedom he felt. That made me wonder how much we tend to value freedom as time passes [and perhaps forget some of the struggles we just survive through]. That broke my expectations. Truth is, these ears of mine were waiting for a tirade against Gorbachev; it would've been fun to hear him speaking ill of Gorbachev.
.Unialgebra
[work in progress...]
.Remains
... no title.
There was a tiny blog post I wrote a couple of days ago that, six hours after being published here, got deleted by me. This six-hour interval makes the time when I slept and had the nightmare where someone would end up reading what I wrote. Today, I decided yet again to write something else, considering that my last lighthearted attempt didn’t survive the usual post-publishing regret that strangles me from having anything at all on this small website.
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... no title.
Took my dirty plate and cup, planning to go to the department bathroom to clean the dishes, when my professor started talking about the possibility of helping me with my future master’s degree. Probably two years from now, that is a challenge I will have to face: the admission exam. What I asked him before being stopped on my way was how much time the master’s degree would take. Two years. After some silence, he said with his soothing voice, “I can be your tutor." To which I answered with a grateful shake of the head, out of words. Thanks to him, life became more manageable.
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... no title.
Trying to cope with being dumb is hard. There's just no easy way out of dumbness; it takes a lot of time and effort. The amount of time and effort needed may as well make it impossible to be free of it. Tackling the desire for stillness is another problem, like fighting an inner devil, if you want to put it like that. The admirable [and laughable] plan of having my back against the wall, having chosen a tough career path, forces me to do something or at least makes me miserable for not doing so. This kind of decision will turn you into a magician and will make you feel like you should pull some trick so as not to drown in the confinement of your limitations. Three of us are left; everyone else resigned or just got stuck way earlier on the academic road. That is life. I'm the worst of the three, but at least I'm still here.
—
... no title.
To me, it's confusing how, living in a world that is change, it is so hard to give a clear direction to one’s own internal and personal changes. The causal connection may explain why that is, but it is hard for me to accept, or, to be more precise, for me to know it.
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... no title.
Those last weeks were marked by the reading of On Free Choice of the Will instead of the usual Buddhist literature. No wonder so many logicians and mathematicians devote their time to the study of God. Think of the soul, for example [my favorite concept inside Christian literature]; isn't it strange that we haven’t grasped a formula for it yet?
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... no title.
Today, Imya's journal entry about visualizing math shapes made me think about a sound misconception I had as a freshman. Back when I was still a chemical engineering student, somewhat disappointed with the formal treatment of math during the courses, the worst part of calculus to me was when we had to look for graphic representations of objects and definitions with a visual meaning. To some, this may seem completely absurd, as we tend to study a geometric interpretation of a lot of things, but to me, it felt like cheating. The search for more abstraction [in my head] meant the “loss of sight,” where ideas are just ideas, formless, devoid of shape. This misconception most of the time translated itself as the wish to solve problems without resorting to drawing a graph, trying to know all there is to know about a curve without properly seeing it, for example. The remainder of this lost misconception, the feeling that remains to this day, is the amazement at things like lattice theory and the abstraction behind a naive connection of dots. Two years ago, I wouldn't have guessed that mathematical ideas, outside what G.H. Hardy called trivial, could have shapes. Thinking of my time as a math student, I find it funny that during one of the Linear Algebra courses I attended, never was an arrow drawn on the whiteboard.
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... no title.
Took a sip of soda from a plastic cup, ate a bit of cake, nodded, and smiled with my one-sided tight smile. The presentation was over, and the leftovers of a research-level algebra class were displayed on the whiteboard. We were all standing around this small table, eating cassava cake, drinking, chatting, and having fun. The way chance arranged us was in pairs, each subgroup of two talking about a different subject, laughing at different jokes. Though I felt like a fish from another pond, being the only undergraduate student in the room, no sorrowing thought running inside my head could battle the amiable feeling of being part of the meeting. The pairs amounted to a modest group of ten, a round big number if you consider that the previous event had fewer than five people.
These two cheerful women were, for some reason, intrigued by my presence. They had greeted me earlier with a warm “tudo bom?” as soon as they entered the room, handing the cake in its plastic case, covered with a white plastic bag. The most outspoken one asked the professor responsible for the presentation who I was. “He is the professor's ****** student from the scientific initiation.” This simple phrase made my day [and my week and my month], even if it is not completely true. The last “algebra with coffee” encounters I attended, where I sat right beside my professor, leaning over so I could follow his writings on a blank sheet of paper, greatly inspired and influenced me. Therefore, it caught me off guard that the time spent learning universal algebra, hearing my professor's Russian accent, and following his blue pen could be called a scientific initiation. Since the beginning of the year, that has been my biggest desire. To learn something new, make a small contribution, produce a tiny dissertation. To work, in summary. This [as far as I know] is not part of the “algebra with coffee” intentions, and that's why I pointed out that the answer given is not entirely true. I'm happy anyway.
25-10-13-update: This colleague of mine convinced everyone that it is a scientific initiation, so it should count as one.
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... no title.
There was this funny bit I read in Socialism Betrayed [which I must describe inaccurately just to make my point], where the authors present a counterargument to the idea that Gorbachev had pro-capitalist views before becoming General Secretary by stating that his actions before the election revealed not only no plan but also no coherence at all. That's the kind of outlook I have on some periods of my life.
Though it is only duḥkha/dukkha [‘pain’; the unease or unsatisfactoriness which characterizes existence] that I'm feeling, some resemblance of peace is to be found inside me. The termination of some long friendships I had is part of the reason for that. There is also the opportunity of eating some cake and drinking some coffee every Thursday, just after enjoying a lecture on universal algebra. Those happenings, combined with the invitation I received from the professor responsible for the Thursday meetings—an invitation to watch three seminars on algebra planned for the next few weeks—those happenings made me very happy.
25-10-13-update: The friendships I had terminated are now partially restored. There's still peace to be found inside of me. The meetings now can happen either Monday or Friday.