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?