Saturday, January 19, 2008

Meanwhile, Back in the Now...

So I guess I need to bring this thing up to date. I’m going to skip the rest of the Europe bit. I covered the better portion of my noteworthy travels, save maybe Bad Durkheim and Oktoberfest; check the pictures.

Africa. Its only been a week and the whole thing seems as much a fantasy now as it did before I went. I tend to forget it happened, but some of pictures make me shudder. I made it to the top of Kilimanjaro, but it took everything I had in me. The summit was a slow hell. Barely on two feet, feebly mis-stepping on a treacherous crater rim, exhausted, blurred vision, hallucinations, frostbite, famine, lungs seized and burning, the complete spiritual revolution whereupon life, purpose and point become a single step, taken on the edge of consciousness, without recourse to logic, pity, or the pleas of the corporeal. These are the most uncomfortable eight hours of my short life.

The mountain and the countryside are gorgeous. The rainforest is lush and dense, the savannahs span endlessly, pocked with giant Baobab, the same for countless miles in every direction. There are creatures there I wasn’t sure actually existed; things not from this epoch. Things that have roamed there since before the first hominid rose from the dirt in that very same spot.

The city of Arusha was absolute chaos. The roads are mostly dirt, some hardly navigable by safari vehicles. Shops are pieced together from scrap wood and sheet metal. Bars crop up in the haphazardly roofed interstices of other buildings. The streets are absolutely bustling: cars hardly restricted to lane or street, bicycles and wheel barrows threading through traffic with abandon, throngs of people trekking to the marketplace, bananas on head. And always somebody looking to make an easy buck off the white people; they’ve got gambits Americas never seen the likes of.

There are pictures in unmanageable quantity. I’ll post some links soon.

And finally back to Boston, ready to do what I came here for a year and a half ago. I’m through the bullshit. I took my classes, passed my qualifiers, did far flung internships, rounded out a Masters degree. Now its thesis time. My brainchild. My masterpiece. It’s not that there are no more hoops to jump through, but everything I do now is directly applicable to the goal. My proposal is due by the end of the term. I’m reading math books that make my head spin. Its extremely taxing work, but it makes me giddy like I haven’t been since I was a freshman getting my first tastes of physics and calculus. Every idea I grasp seems somehow hugely relevant. I know this is about as nerdy as it gets, but I fucking love pure mathematics. It is beautiful and terrible, it is infinitely intricate, and it will swallow you if you’re not careful. It’s better than drugs.

And by whatever fall of the dice, I’m good at it, and this thesis will be epic.