Day 82/83: Film, Walks in the Park, Cabbage, and Math Musings

For the last two and a half months (i.e. ever since getting here), I have been looking for film, half-heartedly and, consequently, unsuccessfully. And then on Tuesday, I decided that I was going to actually commit myself to finding it, and so I asked Anna, the coordinator of the BSM program, whether she knew of any appropriate shops. She said she saw one around a certain area and pointed it out on a map. So after class that day, I started off on the final stretch of my journey to find film. And guess what I found? Film, yes, but even more! The place was this tiny camera store, but there was so much! They had all these beautiful lenses for film cameras, and they some antique point-and-shoots too! It was absolutely fantastic! There was just one lady in the shop (and luckily enough, she spoke a bit of English), and when I asked for film, she let me go behind the counter and look at the entire wall of film. It was brilliant. There was all this fancy stuff, and I had no idea what I was doing, so I just picked some cheapy Fujifilm stuff. Good enough for me. There was a door open that lead into a room behind the main part of the shop, and then I got even more excited: What if they developed film? Then I wouldn't have to wait until I got back to the States like I thought I would! And so I asked, tentatively, and the woman looked at me like I was crazy, and said, "Of course!" And then she let me see the prices, which were listed per print, and I'm not good enough at arithmetic to multiply and divide correctly, so I don't know how expensive it's going to be, but I will probably get at least a few rolls printed there anyway. Point is: Thanks to Anna, I now know a camera shop where I can gaze at beautiful camera equipment way out of my humble college-student budget, where I can purchase film, and where I can get film developed! Yayyayayayayayayayyy! I'm really excited.

So later that day, I went a walk to my favorite place in Budapest: Városliget. I didn't start snapping digital shots until it was nearing sundown, so the pictures didn't come out too well, but here are some (especially since the last few posts here have been pure text).

Such a clean opening for the box of film!

Yay for having film to load!

I love this place. It's so beautiful. This picture really doesn't do it justice.

And nor does this picture.

I love Városliget. And there were a few math problems I was wrestling around in my head, so I sat down on a bench to think for a while. It was fantastic breathing in the cool, fresh air, feeling the refreshing Fall breeze, enjoying the beauty of Városliget, and thinking about math simultaneously. It sort of makes me wonder what other things my recent agoraphobic tendencies are causing me to miss. But more about this later.

I had a midterm today. I hate exams. It went okay, I think (I hope, rather), but still. I. Hate. Exams. This is the first exam I've had to take since June, and I'm really not looking forward to the five math finals I'll have at the end of this term. Anyway. It's over now, and I should stop thinking about it, so that's that. Anyway, I had class until 4 today, and when I stepped outside, it was already almost dark. Crazy, isn't it? We had daylight savings this last weekend and turned our clocks back an hour, so it gets darker even earlier now. And since we're entering winter, it's only going to get darker at earlier and earlier hours...

In any case... when I came back to my apartment after class, this thing was waiting for me on my desk:

An early Christmas present from my roommate. I looked at it and said, "I think it looks like a girl whose name starts with an M." And then my friend said, "Why don't you just call it 'M'?" And since I couldn't think of anything better, that was it. M. Meet M, everyone.

We had a few friends over for dinner tonight. My friend made curry (sooo good!), I contributed a bit by cooking rice, and my roommate made this chocolate-on-top-of-nuts-and-oats thing that tasted amazing. Here's a picture:

Now I'm super full, and it would be best if I waited a bit to let everything digest thoroughly before heading to bed, but I'm tired and have class at 8am tomorrow, so I think I'm going to turn in pretty soon. But first something I want to say...

I've been thinking a lot recently about how I partition my time between studying, socializing, sleeping, etc. For the last two and a half months, my main goal has been to do as much math as possible all the time. I would wake up, do math, go to class, do math, cook while doing math, socialize while thinking about wanting to do math, read math, sleep. But I think I've neglected the non-math parts of me. For instance, I didn't realize how much I missed playing music until a couple weeks ago, when one of the math professors kindly let me borrow his instrument until he gets one from a friend to lend me. And the whole NaNoWriMo thing made me miss writing. And then walking in Városliget made me wish I spent more time there earlier in the semester, when it was a bit less cold and the sun stayed out for a bit longer. I guess in my excitement to learn as much math as I could, I forgot that there was more to me than just my love of math. But there is something else... since I started doing math so exclusively, I started thinking about myself in terms of how productive I was at learning math. So when I got stuck on something, I would get down on myself and the more I struggled, the more my self-esteem would plummet. In the past, I have dealt with this issue by just reminding myself that math is not the only thing I do and so when I felt like I was failing at math, I'd simply turn to other things like writing, music, etc. But then when I became so wrapped up in math, I felt like that was the only thing I had and there was nothing else to turn to, and so my frustrations with math lead me to extrapolate unreasonably and before I knew it, I was stressing about what I would do if I was rejected by all graduate schools, if I couldn't find a job, and then I imagined myself living in a box in a park, and if that was the case and I (somehow) had the freedom to choose which park I would live in, I would choose Városliget, because it's beautiful, and because things are much cheaper in Hungary than they are in the States, and because when it's Fall, the leaves change colors and fall like they're supposed to and it makes you forget that you are you and it somehow makes you think about bigger things. And so it would be that I would go through these ramblings of thoughts, and what I have come to is the following: I love math, and I want to do it for the rest of my life, but that doesn't mean that the only thing I should ever do is math. I'm in the process of learning how to balance the different aspects of my life, and probably along the way, I'll over-compensate one way or another, swinging back and forth between various extremes until I settle at some equilibrium. But I think I've realized this: I love math, but I love other things too. And really, there's more to life than just math.