wednesday word

Wednesday word: mulch

The previous owners dug up a patch of grass in the backyard for a garden, then let it go to seed. Last Autumn, we dug it all up, then let it go to seed again. So now we are digging it up a second time and, as we clear spaces, planting in the newly revealed dirt. Currently we have planted green onions (are coming up), carrots (are coming up), lettuce (only planted today), cucumbers (I think this one is a failure because nothing), peppers (bought a plant which hasn’t died yet), and raspberries (ditto).

I have a callus on my palm from the little shovel to dig up the tall grass growing there. It hurts when I type and rest my hand on the ergonomic bit on the bottom of my ergonomic keyboard they don’t make anymore.

Wednesday word – silently

I have wondered lately if I am living in a very quiet Scandinavian, possibly north German, film with very little dialogue and very little noise. In my backyard, I can listen for wind on grass and here each blade bend as it rushes through. Like an art-house movie walking from empty room to empty room, trailing my fingers behind on the wall as I go. I read a book on the back porch in the sunshine with no one around.

Lately, everything has been quieter.

Wednesday word: induction

Having been once a mathematician, there are so many words whose meanings have split for me into two separate meanings: real world and math world. Ring, group, category, function. My mind jumps straight to the mathematical meaning for most of those. I don’t know if I want that anymore as I leave more and more math behind.

Induction is another one of those math words. Mathematical Induction has a sweet spot in my life because my OAC Algebra/Geometry teacher told the class that it was a completely useless thing of mathematics. Of course, mathematical induction is the only piece of high school mathematics that I used day-to-day for my PhD thesis, so I appreciate the irony.

But maybe my math vocabulary is fading. We bought an induction stove last week and only today did I realize that I hadn’t connected induction stove to mathematical induction. You lose words in any language you don’t use. I guess this is the start of my math loss.

Wednesday word: Proustian

That’s right, I’ve started reading Proust. One quarter of the way through Swann’s Way. I have a copy on my iPad and there are typos and for awhile, reading it without being able to connect wifi-ingly anywhere, I wondered, maybe this isn’t actually Proust. Maybe someone just uploaded eir (yes Spivak pronouns. He wrote my Calculus textbook, so I owe him.) story to Project Gutenberg and said it was Proust. I mean, who reads Proust? Who would know? Like the day I had in high school Calculus (see, Calculus comes up again) when I couldn’t shake the feeling that my teacher was making shit up and that when I started my real life, I’d be sitting in some university Calculus class and realise that everything I learned in high school was a lie.

Later I determined that everything I did learn in high school was essentially a lie, French Grammar and Calculus excepted, unless there’s a vast international conspiracy that’s still pretending about the Calculus I’ve learned and that really, I’ve learned it wrong! The horror! What if all these years of taking derivatives, they’ve all meant to be something else? What should I have been doing instead?

Wednesday word(s): Chithirai Tiru-naal

It was Tamil New Year (Chithirai Tiru-naal) this past Sunday. I went to a wedding on Sunday where the bride’s family was originally from south India and so there was some celebration of Tamil New Year at the wedding as well. Along with Belgian waffles to honour the groom’s heritage. Weddings with waffles and clips from Bollywood movies from the sixties and seventies projected onto a screen during the dancing are very good weddings, much better than my wedding, which involved a lot of crying and some unpleasantness.

So a belated Puthandu Vazthukal, as wikipedia tells me I should say.