“A man is made by a woman” — a phrase worn thin across every social-media feed. It's not clear why a woman isn't made by a man. Well, never mind. You can say it this way or that. That's not what I'm on about right now.
In my day this pop phrase kicked up a lot of noise. But again, that's not what I'm on about. I'm on about how, through my own experience, I came to feel what it means to have “your own” woman beside you.
Recently I got caught up in backing up my drives, of which I'd amassed quite a few. Photos, all sorts of files. I dug up the files of my student research papers. Of course, those “achievements” seem laughable and childish now, but that's not the point. I remembered how I burned for it back then — for all those stochastic processes, Markov chains, the identification of linear systems, and even, you won't believe it, solving the equation describing a charged particle in a potential well. I can now truly appreciate how difficult those problems are, but back then I fearlessly found more-or-less logical solutions and dreamed of a future in science. I don't dream of it now, because I realize how complex the world and science are, and how insignificant I am within it. But again, that's not the point.
In the end it doesn't matter what those papers were about; what matters is that I burned for it, and then I burned out. A small flare-up in 2015, and then silence again.
Don't try... don't try to escape yourself, it's impossible. The damned alcoholic knew this very well, and I didn't.
I disconnected the backup drive from the USB and opened Cursor with the heat equation. I launched an animation, a kaleidoscope shuffling random colors across the simplices of a triangulated circle. My little daughter climbed onto a chair and said, “daddy, do it agaaain.” The graphics card whirred, and one minute of kaleidoscope earned a child's laughter. Now this is what I'm on about — I'm on about the Woman, I'm on about my wife!