End of Month Review

It's been a long, long, month. I did not expect June to be this unexpected. And I need to get some things off my chest. So let's start at the very beginning.

With my extended family leaving the country at the end of May, the first week of June was quite somber. The house was empty and as quiet as it had been before they had even arrived. I had finished the last set of assignments and quizzes for the semester and was not in the headspace for studying. All I remember was the stress of catching up with the lectures I never went to crawling up to my brain and making a home there.

The math class I was taking, on Partial Differential Equations, was interesting, but I thought that the way it was taught to us was not captivating. I had to do a lot of self-studying, as one should be doing, but I had to rely on my friends for the explanations and derivations. In hindsight, I really should have gone to the classes. But hey, I just heard that I passed the exam for that class, so all is well, right?

As for physics, we were studying Classical Mechanics and Advanced Electrodynamics. This, I thought, was the class for me. The concepts that they were teaching us were the ideas that I had been building up to. Lagrangian and Hamiltonian dynamics were an enigma when I first heard of it back in high school, and now that I was studying it, I was... unsatisfied. Not that the ideas were inadequate, but that we had spent more time focusing on bifurcation and chaos theory. It was all good, learning new things, but then we get to electrodynamics.

I should preface this by saying that I love electrodynamics. I just dislike the way that the course is taught. In saying that, I do not know what I was looking at for most of the time in the lectures. The idea was that we were studying advanced electrodynamics. OK, great, we're going to combine special relativity with classical electrodynamics. But, my God, the lecture notes and slides were undecipherable. It was Greek poetry at its finest, lacking numbers and pushing each letter to their limits. Again, I love physics, I love this subject in physics, but the lecture was too fast and too furious.

For everyone's sanity, I will not put images of the things that I have seen. But if you really want to, you can always Google 'advanced electrodynamics' to see how deep and confusing things can be .

Moving on, I was knee deep in studies and finally finished the two exams. That was an ordeal. I'm just looking at the silver linings, that this is the penultimate exams I'll be having this year. Just two more in the next and that's the end of my degree. And that's the problem I'm facing: it's my last semester now. Three years have gone so fast.

June has got me thinking about what I want to do in the future. Things are looking dire and interesting, all in the same time. I know that I want to do physics, but I also know that I want to teach. Which do I prioritize? I think I'm too traumatized from all the stress that the classes has left on me, but my curiosity and desire to learn more is still there. I don't know if I still have enough gas to keep going.

To rationalize this insanity, I've been writing new poems and exploring new themes and imagery. This month may not have as many publications as the previous months, but I think that the poems coming out are more mature in style. I'm really excited for all the new things coming soon. There's been talks (with myself) of a book coming soon. Let's hope I find the determination to get that going. The choices are either a chapbook for poetry or a full-fledged novel. The future is very exciting in this frontier.

Naturally segueing out of this existential crisis, June has been a wild ride. Here's to hoping that July will be a little bit more tame. We are, after all, in the second half of the year, so things could go right for me, right? Let's just manifest great things this coming months. That should do the trick.