The Secret Nature of Vectors

"The Secret Nature of Vectors" was the title of today's Physics lecture. It was less of a lecture, really, and more of a discussion of a seemingly disconnected series of random topics. Our professor reminds me of an aged Jeff Goldblum mixed slightly with Richard Lewis and Frazier Crane. He's terribly smart but, in my opinion, has so much going on upstairs that it gets lost in translation on the way out to the rest of us. Going to class is more of an entertaining experience than an informative one. Really, he's a riot.

Anywho, he writes this on the board and I'm thinking that it sounds like the middle chapter of a bad novel.

Chapter 6: The Secret Nature of Vectors

Some noise outside woke him. A cat knocking cans out of the garbage? A gunshot a few streets over? Slowly, he reclined back into the old caved mattress, careful to turn his body so that he springs would miss his spine, his shoulder blades, the healing gunshot wound on his left buttock. Inches below the cracked plaster ceiling, he could make out the dusty fan blades lazily tracing their arc. The medicine was still making him nauseous. After two weeks, he thought it might go away. With each dose, he was surprised to find himself queasy.

Alone in the dark, he rubbed his eyes, yawned, and scratched his lower belly. He replayed the night of the shooting over in his head, as he often did since then. His half-hearted laugh broke the silence when he asked himself why he didn't just continue for another 25 meters 45 degrees north of east. If he had, his net displacement would have certainly put him out of harm's way.

Gingerly, he rolled onto his side, avoiding any pressure on the wound. He felt the bandage and then the mattress for dampness. Again, it had wept through the bandage. Again, he'd have to change the dressing by himself, awkwardly in front of the mirror. He tried to fill his mind with thoughts of her as he buried his face deeply into the pillow and breathed in the fading scent of her hair.

Yes. It's driving me mad. Week two and it's driving me mad. Hopeless isn't it?

Tomorrow is another "hell day." All classes and labs back to back to friggin' back. Maybe we'll continue the discussion of the bee dance in my Animal Bio class. Evidently, we'll be tested on interpreting a bee dance. When a honey bee enters the hive with pollen, it does a dance by doing a little "waggle" of it's abdomen and walking in a figure eight pattern. This dance indicates the direction and distance that other bees should fly to reach the pollen source. Actually, it's pretty cool stuff. I think I'm gonna start doing it in the lobby when classes let out and just see how long it takes me to get tackled by the campus cops.

Gender Ratio
The whole gender ratio hasn't been as bad as I was expecting. I thought I'd be completely overwhelmed by being one of the few men. It's not really so bad. Yesterday, one of the women in the program asked if I thought any of the undergrad women were noticing me. I told her I really hoped so because it's too hot to keep wearing the leather chaps and because I haven't been shaving and oiling my chest for nothing.