As The Old Saying Goes...

There’s a side to me that has gone unmentioned. At least I think so. I quite possibly could have mentioned this in an earlier entry, but to be quite honest, I’m too lazy to actually go back and reread over all of my previous entries for mention of this side of me. I suppose I could do the whole “find text” thing, but what if I search for the wrong text? Then I’m basing my assumptions on misinformation that is incomplete. So now I’m stuck. I can be lazy and repetitive, or I could put some effort into this, avoid repetition, but risk telling a lie. Not that there’s anything against lies, but I wouldn’t be able to correct it, and I’d appear stupid. Therefore, I’m just gonna assume that this is something that I haven’t mentioned before. Not that this will come as a surprise to any of you, since I think almost everybody who reads this knows me. Well, as I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, I love math. It’s so important to me that it has even influenced the title of this blog site. However, as shocking as it may seem, math is not my entire life. Another main portion of my life is devoted to swimming. This is totally obvious to many of you, who have probably noticed that around half of the shirts that I actually wear are related to swimming. Many others might have noticed that late winter my hair turns a nasty (and I mean it, it’s absolutely disgusting), bleached white color, and then it all gets shaved off along with all of my (visible) body hair. If you knew me in high school, you also would’ve noticed my hair being different colors, such as orange/purple, blue, or red for swimming. Another indication of my swimmerness... swimmerness? Swimmerosity? Hmmm... Swimmerishness?!? I think I’ve gotta stick with swimmerness on this one. Anyways, something that is an indication of that is the fact that I spend most of my free time doing something swimming related such as practicing, racing, or lifting (which I guess doesn’t make it my free time, but oh well). Anyways, as I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, I love swimming. From dressing up in skirts and wifebeaters to cheer on the girls team, to training endlessly, swimming has become apart of my blood. A rookie might mistakenly think that swimming is more apart of my life than math! Now, swimming certainly is important to me, but this might be taking things a little bit too far. True both math and swimming are huge part of my life, and to look at them in relation to each other, it might appear as though my love for them both is endless, but this certainly isn’t necessarily the case. The best way of analyzing this predicament is to see it in terms of a math problem. To see this as the limit as X approached infinity of (X^n)/(X^m), where n and m are both positive, real numbers. Now, if we consider X^n to represent my love of math and X^m to be my love of swimming, the limit seems to be incalculable. However, this equation can be simplified quite a bit to Limit as X approached infinity of X^(n-m). Therefore, all we need to do is establish a relationship between n and m. Since they’re both positive real numbers, the answer to this will either be 1 (if m=n), 0 (if m is greater than n), or infinity (if m is less than n). Now, the more I think about it, the worse this example seems, but the point I’m trying to get across if that I think m
Anyways, while I do love math more than swimming, I still love them both very much, and over summer, there’s plenty of time for both of them. Therefore, I decided to check what I could do for both to keep doing stuff for them both. I got some book recommendations for math, and everybody who I talked to for swimming said that it is essential to maintain strength for swimming, so I should definitely keep lifting. With that in mind, I decided that I would do stuff over the summer to keep myself in shape. I talked around, and found that Halle (for those of you who don’t know her, she’s a friend from high school, and now goes to Wittenberg) was also hoping to do some sort of lifting over the summer as well. Since we’re supposed to have lifting partners, not only for spotting and such, but also to keep us motivated, I decided that we should work out together. Well, she goes to capital, and since it’s like five bucks for the entire summer, I decided that it’d be worth it. They’ve got everything that I need, so why not? Well, the only problem wiht that, is that they’ve got horrible hours for the community, since the entire community doesn’t attend Capital University. The hours for that are 6-8 AM and some time in the evening. Well, their summer hours, which I didn’t find out until lately, are 6am-8pm, but this past Monday (17 th) I didn’t know that at all (and I found out that day, and the next time I went to work out, I slept through my four alarms, and went in after I got plenty of sleep). But since I didn’t know about the better hours, I was there at 7am that Monday. Well, I was all finished by around 8:15, so I went over to Michelle’s house to say goodbye since she was going to Korea and Japan later that day. After a while I decided that I should let her carry on with her things with packing and such, so I walked home. And when I was walking home, I had an epiphany! After getting up so early, I was reminded of something. As the old saying goes, “The early bird gets the worm.” I never knew how true that until that day. It was such a remarkable moment in my life, I made certain to document it as best I could. It hit me at 8:57am Monday morning, the 17 th of May, 2004. I think about all the event leading up to that moment: the rain, the perfect timing, nature, the greater meaning of life.... I was thinking about it, and they all contributed to the epiphany. I looked out into the street and saw how true that expression really is. I saw a bird start to fly away, but it didn’t look quite right. Upon further inspection, I was able to note that dangling from it’s mouth, was a worm! Instantly I remembered the old saying, and then the truth of that expression hit me like a freight train. True, I’d have to be stupid enough to be standing on the railroad tracks as a freight train came flying at me, and I’d have to survive, but you know those cartoons where the evil villain ties the innocent person to railroad tracks. That kinda stuff happens in cartoons... why not in real life? True I’m not the most innocent person, and I don’t really fit the description of a person who gets tied to railroad tracks, but hey, it could happen. So anyways, it then hit me how true that expression really is. The early bird really does get the worm. Then I started looking around, and I saw more birds, but they didn’t have worms dangling from their mouths. From this I came to two conclusions. Either the expression is actually wrong, and the early bird doesn’t get the worm, which is absolutely ridiculous, because it’s a very old expression, and if it were really false, other people would’ve figured it out by now. Since there was one bird who did get the worm, it could’ve been the earliest bird, but I’m sure there’s another explanation. That better explanation is that the early bird really does get the worm. And using that expression, which should really be called a universal law, as I was looking around and seeing birds without worms, I wasn’t looking at hungry birds or anything. I was actually seeing birds who had already feasted so greatly that they couldn’t eat any more. With that thought, I felt pretty bad for the worms that had to sacrifice themselves in order to maintain the validity of that universal law of nature. And when I thought about it some more, I realized that I had been the early bird, getting up at 6:30 to go work out, but I didn’t get my worm. I kept walking home, waiting for my ‘worm’ but by the time I got home I was starting to give up hope. There wasn’t a ‘worm’ in sight for me! I was getting frazzled that this universal law actually had a flaw. If a universal law has a flaw, the only explanation is that the world is coming to an end. Therefore, the fate of the entire universe was in my hands. I had to find my ‘worm’ and soon, because fatigue from getting up so early was setting in. It was beginning to look like a desperately hopeless situation. There was no ‘worm’ in sight, and I was on my bed, falling asleep. If I fell asleep without my ‘worm’, I would be solely responsible for the complete and utter destruction of the world, universe, and everything we know. However, with sleep setting in, these complicated thoughts were confusing me more and more, and it became totally useless to even try anymore. My mind was set to ‘over-simplify’ mode and there was nothing I could do about it. However, then, as it simplicity was the key... as if my fortune cookie was correct and avoiding over complications... as if it all made sense to me, it suddenly all made sense to me. The realization that I was actually not a bird set it. Since the universal law didn’t apply to me since I’m not a bird, the world didn’t have to not make sense. In fact, it began to make perfect sense. Suddenly the sun began to shine, the bird were chirping (at least the ones not still enjoying their early morning worms), and I finally, the fear of life as we know it coming to an end vanished, and I fell back asleep.