Woo. Valentine's Day. Yay.
It's amazing to me how transparently obvious the structure of the brain can be in some ways, yet ridiculously mysterious in other ways.
I have immense trouble (which has caused me infinite problems) with remembering names of people and the days of the week, in Portuguese. But someone tells me a number (like a phone number) and I've got it memorized and it dances around in my head mocking the names I need to know and can't manage to keep in my brain.
The most frustrating part is that the names of the days of the week are numbers, and so I memorized them as a sequence of numbers. The later in the week I'm trying to reference, the longer it takes me to come up with the name. So even though the numbers aren't a problem, counting in Portuguese is. It's become so apparent that the math and language parts of my brain are so far away from each other they couldn't even begin to communicate!
I had a rough day today. Some of it had to do with it being Valentine's day. Some of it had to do with my students. Some of it had to do with other professors telling me I need to hit kids (one specifically said, her daughter). Some of it had to do with world politics. But it was mostly just a day that I needed to be in a rotten mood for, for no other reason than I felt like being down and homesick. For whatever reason, it sometimes feels good to feel bad.
Peace
John
