It Took Me a While

It took me a while to get through Khan’s videos.

If you know anything about Sal Kahn, you might say, “oh, he has this whole academy”, and you’re right. Mind you, I hadn’t found the website yet. Or maybe it didn’t exist.

But several months in, the website launched, at least a recognizable form.

I didn’t speed through the videos. I had to really understand the concept. I had to explain it to myself. And then to whomever would listen.

I didn’t have a job, but I had my favorite linen pants and favorite shirt. I let my hair grow. I stopped shaving. I lined the walls of the my room with 8x4 white panels from Home Depot that were essentially white board.

I wrote formulas on the wall and considered them throughout the day. I sold my motorcycle for unrelated reasons, and walked everywhere, which would give me reasons to get out of the house, and break up the day. Then I would come home and write some more.

Sometimes that cat would meander in to the room and lie on the bed.

He would snap at me sometimes, but he would still hang out for a portion of the day. I’m not sure if it was healthy in that we kind of got along, or unhealthy in that we didn’t particular care for each other but still voluntarily hung out.

Cats never really liked me. The roommates girlfriend said it was because I was abrupt in my movements. In my speech patterns.

Really?

I didn’t like that so much, but maybe it was true. It seemed consistent with the cats behavior. So I tried to smooth out my…everything. I’m not sure it had an effect.

But I grew fond of the cat.

I had some friends, and I remember going to a sushi restaurant that used long rolls of paper as their table cloth, and gave us crayons to draw with. I started writing formulas.

Not that memorization was the absolute end goal, but it was a side effect. And that’s all I really wanted to think about. Some people thought it was weird. They thought I was weird. And they were right. But it didn’t matter, I wasn’t particularly interested in them anyway.

Some people thought I was showing off, but I knew I couldn’t do anything to dissuade them from that idea. It was just the social situation we were in.

To be honest, it was a very ostracizing time for me. Both because of the mathing, and because I didn’t really know what I was doing with my life. All I knew was that I wanted to math it out, and I didn’t really want the life I had before.

This was at a turning point for me because I had been used to being pretty - the guy at least x number of girls had a crush on, but that wasn’t happening anymore. Maybe I was aging. Maybe it was because I no longer had patience for the social situations that I had previously thrown myself into constantly.

It turned out, I was much happier when I spent most of my time away from people. This was the first time I had ever made that connection.

So I would go out with friends, and expect girls to give me googly eyes as they tended to do…but they didn’t. It was distressing. Not because I ever really did anything about it, but because it was a marked change and I really didn’t understand what had happened, only that it had, and that it hurt, and that I didn’t know what to do about it.

So I turned inward.

My heart hurt, because I really had no one to connect with, but it was also bursting with joy, because I was addressing a deep insecurity little by little, as well as discovering more parts of myself that I liked much better than those social situations and those googly eyes.

But I did miss the googly eyes.

That time changed everything for me. It changed my view of myself, my view of people, even my views on God the entire nature of the universe. I was also moving away from

One time, about 1 1/2 years in to this process, I was walking with a friend, and I was trying to explain my view on relationships. I used calculus, because it was so obviously the same thing.

She stared at me. She laughed.

She was right to laugh; the implied humor was the idea that I thought the calculus I was referring to was accessible to an arbitrary person. Moreover, even if someone had taken the class, and taken the book at face value, they weren’t really applying to…everything.

That was another pivotal moment for me - a moment wherein I realized that maybe I needed to spend some more time outside of myself, so as to not get lost among my own meanderings and self-centered.

After all, that’s what I had been accused of in the beginning at the sushi restaurant. It wasn’t true then, and I didn’t really need it to be true ever.