Nocturne, but a few hours later

Listening: The local Spanish channel (Univision 41), so I can concentrate.

In the fourth hour of the morning, the vigilant observer may detect an anomaly in the teenagers' behavior: they are no longer actually watching the TV. They are listening to the sound of the fan in the projector, maybe, or at most taking stray words from the characters' voices and fueling their hazy imaginations.

It always seems very important to me, during the early morning, that I express this feeling, that I not let it pass with the dawn and fall asleep. But there's not much to say: I feel inspired, but have no subject. It's just that everything is so much more interesting, more exciting, when you're so tired that you regress to childhood and you find yourself thinking thoughts that were familiar then: "it's 4:49. 4 plus 4 is 8, how do I get to 9? 4 divided by 4 is 1, 8 plus 1 is 9; so (a+b)+(a/b) = c ... shit, now it's 4:50."

As soon as you move, even just to sit a different way, the feeling either changes or disappears: just in writing this I've almost lost it. Why does it feel so important to hold on to it? It's not really a feeling of being alive. It's just that words like "alive" are reentering my vocabulary. "Pain". I've been living off the words "beauty", "love", "morality", "ennui", "sex" - every feeling that you can make impersonal, intransitive. The words "trust", "honesty"...well, it's harder to think of them; these are the ones I haven't been using.

My sister and I walked to the pizza place yesterday, where she informed me that I was aloof, self-centered, and unavailable. I denied it, but it was true. This blog is helping, though. I know you've only seen three posts so far, but I have about five more in Drafts, and I think about it a lot. I ate with my dad at the diner on Route 303 this morning, and I told him something that I think made sense:

I know the answer to almost every question people ask me. That doesn't mean I'm smart, it's just that over the course of a day, nobody asks me anything I don't know. So it becomes easy to give automatic answers, and to simply let my mind wander - except that it doesn't wander, it falls asleep. And it's been asleep all summer. So I think I'm doing this blog in order to ask myself questions I don't know the answers to, in order to force myself to think, be creative, and eventually rejoin the ranks of sentient humans. And, as I assured my dad, to tune up my writing for those college essays I'm supposed to be working on.

How strange, to realize there's actually something wrong with you.

Mathematician disenchanted

Listening: Justin Timberlake, "Cry Me a River"

I was emailed a rude awakening today.

Back in April, my BC Calc class was learning about Taylor series, and I decided to figure out whether there was a non-recursive formula for the nth derivative of a function. I spent two months (really, four weeks, because I put it down for a while) working on it, and by June I had the answer and an eight-page proof for it. I submitted it as my final project for the course, and made a presentation of it to my class. It was really impressive, by all accounts.

Fast-forward to August 11, when I had a meeting at Pace University in the city to show my work to a high-ranking professor. She was incredibly friendly, besides displaying a fluency in mathematical thought and discourse that I was beginning to believe didn't exist. She worked out two simple but diverse examples of my formula, expressed her surprise that it held for such different kinds of functions (polynomial and trigonometric, if you're keeping score at home), and said that she'd forward it to a friend of hers at UNC Chapel Hill. Most importantly, she said she'd never seen it before, which meant I might have an opportunity to publish it, breeze into college, and live happily ever after.

Except that she just emailed me back to say that the UNC professor had already known of the formula. It was impressive that I'd come up with it independently, but it was definitely not original.

And here I was strutting around in the meantime like I were a prodigious Mathematician, imagining myself opening a Priority Mail envelope to find a copy of the Whatever-Organization Journal of Mathematics with my name in the table of contents, acceptance letters, bragging rights, recognition, satisfaction.

She's still writing a letter for colleges describing the meeting and vouching that I did come up with everything independently, but I really had had the highest hopes. And now I'm a lowly peasant-child again.

Shit!

Manifesto

Let's get something straight right now:

You can't expect anything from this blog. It's nothing. I am sixteen and this is just a place for my monologues to go to die.

The title, for now, is "Across the Retina". It may not still be, whenever you're reading this, but it connotes my attempt to break out of an annoying "autopilot" phase that I'm in, where I feel so distanced from the reality in front of me that I have to keep reminding myself to, y'know, exist.

I'm a senior at North Rockland High School. In terms of high intellectual discourse, it's about as interesting as its Wikipedia page. But it's fine. There are a few really talented teachers, and our orchestra's pretty great, and they pretty much let me do what I want in choosing courses. The students are mostly charismatic and bright, although there are only a couple of real intellectuals. Luckily for everyone else, NR is great for teaching you how to bullshit your way around anything. For example, my conductor always asks us to switch from Violin I to II or vice versa, five minutes before a concert. End result: we became really good sightreaders. Everybody wins. It's just that NR seems to be training suburbians, not leaders. It bothers me. But it's home.

I live in a suburb of New York that does not lend itself to complaining. It's nice. The neighbors don't bother us or each other, we're close enough to the city to be vital and rational, and we spend our lives driving up and down the Palisades Parkway intently, but not urgently.

I have one nephew, two parents, three sisters, and four animals. One of the sisters, Melissa, got smart and moved to Pennsylvania after college to teach special education to urban sixth-graders. Everyone else still lives here, in relative tranquility most of the time, although at our peak we were quite a dramatic bunch. You'll be reading about that, trust me.

It's currently summer, and I have a Lot of Shit to do. I suppose I'll list:

- Teach self Music Theory I so as not to look like idiot in AP Theory

- Read and answer essay questions about summer reading books

- Read and understand "El sur" and "La muerte y la brujula" by Jorge Luis Borges

- Finish mechanics-related problem sets for Physics

- Plan courses of independent study in AP Spanish Lit and AP Physics C, (see last two items)

- Take and pass road test for driver's license

- Plan overnight reunion party for 25 camp alumni/ae

- Revive social life post-camp

- Apply to college (Picked the schools, but still have to write the ESSAYS!)

Given that, I don't know why I chose now of all times to start a blog. I guess it's that I have to bring myself into some kind of healthy emotional state from which to write my college essays. Not that I'm unhealthy. Maybe "lucidity" is a better word for what I'm seeking. I need to escape from the "autopilot" state I mentioned before - it's as if I just think my actions into existence, without actually performing them; does that make sense? I consider which words I'd like to see on the screen, and then my fingers type them out, but there's some silent disconnect going on that I don't like.

(My brain silently debates itself on whether all this is actually a personal conflict between nihilism and consequentialism. I write on.)

So I'm using this blog to tie myself to the universe. Lofty purpose, yes. But necessary.