My alumni advisor told me the one thing I’d miss the most this upcoming semester is reading. Too bad I spent most of my summer packing our old house, instead. I’m now trying to enjoy some bubble gum fiction (Yup, cuz that will totally prime my brain and emotional state for school). None of those classics or hipster-modern reads that my advisor likely had in mind.
I mean, I tried going through an old calculus textbook (calculus counts as a classic, right? The foundations of calculus go back for centuries, anyways) and stopped in section 2.4, right before actual derivatives. Not the whole limit as x approaches a, with h representing Δx... The fun derivative concept where you bring down the exponent and then subtract one. God, how the heck am I supposed to be TA-ing for Calculus I if that’s the best I can do to describe a simple derivative? I saved all my notebooks from the calculus sequence but I doubt I’ll be able to
- Find them since they’re probably sitting in a tote that’s buried under all the other fifty totes in our sun porch.
- Understand my notes since my lecture notes are only interpret-able during which the semester they were written. The only class notes that don’t pertain to that general condition would be my sociology notes, since I literally had to transcribe Dr. Rousseau’s every lecture because she was so damn specific in her exam questions.
- Take the time to actually read and retain it by the time I start TA-ing, which is about a couple weeks away. When you’ve been helping move to a new house in this heat, I’m sorry, but your brain is sometimes too tired to appreciate the feats of Newton, Leibnitz, and L’Hospital.
Since moving to my parents’ new house, I found my collection of Princess Diaries books. Perhaps I’ve been so stressed with my family’s impressive rendition of KUWTK or finally realized that I’ve been missing my childhood past time of reading fiction featuring questionable female role models, because I’ve binge-read 4 Princess Diaries books the last couple days. And that’s in-between the packing and cleaning.
(This is the one I’m currently reading)
Princess Diaries is the type of series you don’t feel guilty speed reading. It’s kind of like eating the small, micro-sized macaroni shells in our organic box Mac & Cheese we once got. The shells are a good quick fix for lunch, but not really enough to make you feel guilty for eating 40 shells, when that’s the average number of shells per fork-ful.
A hot pot of rice 