A Certain Slant of Light

YOU GUYS I HAVE THE BEST IDEA EVER! I have to write a paper for my Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft class and should have picked a topic like a month ago, oops, but the encroaching deadline kickstarted my brain and - I'm going to write about fairies and fairytales in Victorian and Edwardian England!

Because seriously. The Victorians obsessed about fairies like modern people obsess about zombies.

And it has ALL MY FAVORITE THINGS. Magic. Children's literature. Victorian England. Fairy tales. Fairy tales published in a socialist newspaper to inculcate proper socialist values into children. Victorian writers. Folk beliefs popping out in strange places, or being created. The Cottingley Fairies. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle totally believed in fairies.) Women writers. Art history. Fairies!

YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!

One odd thing I've noticed about geeks: we take pride in our lack of social skills. On LJ profiles, in the halls of my very geeky school, people use variants of "I have no social skills" as an overture for friendship.

This is exceedingly odd. First, it seems like social skills are something you'd want in a friend - because who doesn't want friends who know how to compromise, when to apologize, and what to do to cheer you up? Who will notice when you need cheering up, as someone without social skills will not?

There's a kid in my Russian class who has no social skills. He interrupts everyone and he laughs whenever people make mistakes. He doesn't strike me as good friend material.

Second, it's not true that geeks lack social skills. Most of the geeks I know have at least as many social skills as the average person; possibly more, given the amount of interpersonal drama average people seem to pack into their lives.

Of course, if interpersonal drama as the norm by which to measure social skills - then definitely, you want friends who have none, who don't know how to lie, cheat, back stab, play stupid status games, or steal your significant other for petty revenge.

It's just awfully unfortunate that we've defined social skills as antisocial behavior.

New Mexico has an enchantingly geometric state quarter: a Zia sun symbol over the state of New Mexico.

I’ve developed opinions on quarters this year because I need an endless supply to feed the laundry beast. New Mexico rocks. Connecticut is pretty and the oak tree also feels nice under the thumb. Mississippi has beautiful blousy magnolias.

My own state quarter is emblazoned with…a race car. I recognize that normal people only think of Indiana in terms of the Indy 500, and that my chauvinistic Hoosier pride is a result of the fact that I grew up in a nice city with cool people and not because Indiana has as much awesome as it does corn, but still. A race car.

It would be one thing if it was just cool states like New Mexico and Connecticut getting quarters with Zia sun symbols and oak trees, but no. Oklahoma—a state so full of nothing that the rapaciously land-hungry United States government left it as Indian Territory until the twentieth century—has a quarter with a beautiful long-tailed scissor-tailed flycatcher (saith wikipedia) swooping across the reverse, a coin so marvelous that I actually paused to check that it was actually US currency.

Oklahoma’s quarter beats my quarter. Oklahoma! I am filled with woe.

I really, really want the writing tutor job next year. As wonderful as washing dishes is, another year of it and I might run mad and destroy the dish machine in a flashy and permanent manner.

So I’ve been putting together an answer for the essay questions on the writing tutor application: “What do you think you have to offer as a tutor? Why do you want this job? How will you improve your tutoree’s writing skills, as opposed to merely eviscerating the particular papers they bring you, and thus ruining their self-esteem for life?”

I might be paraphrasing that last.

So I’m trying to find the correct balance between truth and answers that will actually get me the job. I do not, you see, want to become a writing tutor because I want to help people. I want to become a writing tutor so I can wage war on the flagrant abuse of apostrophes, restore the comma to its proper place in the pantheon of punctuation, and exhort students to abstain from picking up stray synonyms in sordid thesauri. Just say no. No matter how shiny they look.

As a bonus, I'll inflict my fondness for alliteration on my clients. They'll get their money's worth of neurosis, if nothing else.

I think I’ll continue working on that answer.

***

In other news, I have forgiven the post office for changing the stamp price, because my wonderful mother (who should have gotten an adulatory post on Mother’s Day, but was deprived because I couldn’t reduce her to five hundred words or less) sent me a pack of very stylish one-cent stamps. Asymmetrical my envelopes may be, but they're pretty.

A couple days ago silksieve linked a trailer for Fermat’s Room, a Spanish mathematical thriller, which is so cool I though I would pass it on. There are subtitles if you don’t speak Spanish.

This combines a lot of my favorite things—movies, Spanish, people with intense and passionate interests (in math, in this case), and esoteric historical knowledge. The Fermat of the title was a French civil servant by day and a rogue mathematician at night, who scribbled bits and pieces of mathematical proofs as marginalia in the books in his library.

His most famous theorem—Fermat’s last theorem, which was solved in 1994 by a British mathematician named Andrew Wiles—states that, for any number n greater than 2, x^n + y^n is not equal to z^n. Evidently Wiles presented his proof at the very end of a very dry two-day-long lecture, during which his audience grew in size and breathless expectation until Wiles set down his chalk and said “This proves Fermat’s last theorem,” and the mathematicians cheered like Packers fans.

It makes me wish I was a math geek.

Speaking of math geeks, Erdos has to be the definition of an eccentric mathematician. He traveled the globe, spreading mathematical enlightenment, helping colleagues prove conjectures, never staying after a theorem had been conquered. The Lone Ranger of mathematics.