Oddly Directionless and Stressfree: A Passive State

Today kind of lacked a realistic element. I don't know what it was. We had a substitute in Spanish with a horrible accent, we had a lecture over some boring equations on circuits that I already knew, we wasted time on that infamous project in chemistry with a odd substitute, we had a rather difficult (only because it was on stuff from 3 weeks ago) test on which I got a 42 out of 45 (a tie for the highest at that point in the day; broken later I'm sure though) in US history, we took a reasonably easy test in math over vectors, triangles, and complex number coordinate planes, and in English our student teacher taught us for the very first day and we began a really awful book. After school I went downtown. On the busride down I had to listen to Malcolm drone on about some exchange student from France and how he was going to spend a quarter in France seeing relatives. I wandered around downtown for a little over and hour. I stopped in Powell's and bought a ancient used copy of Brave New World Revisited for $2.50. I almost bought the Dover thrift edition of Thus Spake Zarathustra (it was brand new and only $3.00 too), but decided against it because I have too many other things to read. The Dover thrift editions really are amazing. I think Shakespeare is about $1.25, and things up to about 400 pages are typically not more than $4.00. Then I looked at some physics books and wallowed in sadness from the fact that I haven't learned any calculus yet (But I can and do understand special reletivity, which mostly doesn't require it... Yay!). The thing that annoys me is this: there's all this really awesome physics literature that puts incredibly complicated things like string theory and puts them into words and ideas that are understandable to basically anyone; i.e. they have no math. The problem is, is that this gets old after awhile. Without math in physics, you can understand things conceptually, but it's very difficult to understand why they happen. I can tell you that you can't go faster than the speed of light, but why is that? Well, if you read Relativity, by Einstein (a really good book too; it does the math and explains it all very well) then you know that it's because you divide by zero, which occurs because of the way you derive the Lorentz transformation and fit it into the theory. With that mathematical knowledge, one can make their conceptualizations. Physics lacks meaning to me without math. Unfortunately, much of the most profound and cutting-edge physics (from my knowledge) requires calculus and more higher level mathematics. So if I want to go outside my physics class and gain useful knowledge with a mathematical basis, it is fairly difficult to find stuff that I can fully understand. That's changing though, as I learn more formulae from physics and slowly (very unfortunately) enhance my mathematical knowledge. Besides, math is more beautiful than words anyway. But back to the point. I wandered around Powell's some more. Afterward, I walked over to Djangos but they've closed! Just totally empty. I found them on the web, and it turns out that they're this giant company with tons of stores and a major online store. But the store by Burnside is now closed. So I walked up to the Musik Centur, a sheet music store, for a few minutes and then went home. Buying trumpet music online is really the way to go, I think.