I love the greatpoets community, I love Philip Glass, and I love gardening.

A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA
by Allen Ginsberg

       What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
       In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumera-
tions!
       What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes! --and you, Garcia Lorca,
what were you doing down by the watermelons?


       I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eying the
grocery boys.
       I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
       I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
       We strode down the open corridors togethe in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

       Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
       (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
       Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees
add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.
       Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past
blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
       Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry
and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the
boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
                                                        Berkeley 1955

I am spending this weekend in LA, with Ben. I miss him, and look forward to seeing him, but one thing that's great about long distance this time is that there isn't any defeatism or worry over whether we'll eventually make it work in the same place. We're apart, but we won't be in about two months. I love Ben so very much, and feel so complete with him, and am so excited to see him for a couple of days and go to the beach together and cuddle at night.

Love Songs

I have remembered beauty in the night,
Against black silences I waked to see
A shower of sunlight over Italy
And green Ravello dreaming on her height;
I have remembered music in the dark,
The clean swift brightness of a fugue of Bach's,
And running water singing on the rocks
When once in English woods I heard a lark.

But all remembered beauty is no more
Than a vague prelude to the thought of you --
You are the rarest soul I ever knew,
Lover of beauty, knightliest and best;
My thoughts seek you as waves that seek the shore,
And when I think of you, I am at rest.

--Sara Teasdale

I spotted an old favorite John Donne poem in greatpoets, and decided to share with you a couple of my favorites. They are all common, because those are the ones you read in high school Brit Lit. But I really like them... I should read more poetry. The first is very bitter and funny. The compass metaphor in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" is one of the most beautiful metaphors in literature, I think. But my favorite is the last one.

( song )

( a valediction: forbidding mourning )

( a valediction of weeping )

The first day of quantum mechanics, as I think I've mentioned, was unpleasant. It's hard to get around the feeling that you're doing something as penance, or to make up for a mistake you don't think you made, etc. etc. And quantum mechanics, everyone agrees, is unpleasant.

endless integrals
many miscalculations
my summer of woe

But one of my stronger points is the ability to adapt and not leave myself unhappy for long, though, so things have improved a lot since then. The professor, Wohl, is a big help. He's very clear and understanding, and wants to be sure the class understands what he's doing. He also throws in some interesting, non-test-related facts, like Benford's Law. I know if I were unclear on the material, I wouldn't like that trait as much, but since it's all review, I really enjoy the interesting bits.

from a tangled and
hideous Hamiltonian,
pure eigenfunction.

But nothing can really change the fact that I've seen everything before. The homework is interesting and not all repeats (since Wohl writes his own problems), so I get a lot out of that in terms of furthering my knowledge. The lectures, not so much, especially since he hands out his lecture notes so I don't really have to take notes. Sometimes they're not bad, because I can review the derivations for things, but today we were going over Dirac notation, which is tricky when you haven't seen it and blindingly simple once you've used it some.

in a freezing room
we review formalism
interminably.

I found out the other day that the practice rooms are open at 8:15 AM on weekdays now, so I can go to play piano in between swimming and lecture, before work. I'm having a lot of trouble getting everything I want to do streamlined into a day. And although I promised myself I would go to lecture everyday (it forces me to think about the material more than I would just skimming the notes by myself), I can't help but think how I'm wasting that time that would be more fun in some other pursuit.

want to be outside
this beautiful wavefunction
useless for surfing.

I'm still happy to be pursuing my goals, and I understand I'll be more at peace with quantum after this, and more easily able to convince grad committees that I know it. And of course, it'll probably come in handy later. But the parts of quantum mechanics I'm interested in aren't quite the parts we're covering, not yet at least.

math is beautiful
in nature, not here where the
colors are so stale.