Description du poste
You will agree that for a woman who has fought three duels, all of them kills, indulging in such fears is ludicrous. But what's around the corner now is a duel so big that I don't think I have the guts for it; in Faust's words: Verweile doch, du bist so schoen! Keep it as it is. Don't change. [...] Take my life but don't take away the meaning of my life.
—"When It Changed" by Joanna Russ
I've been crashing Prof. Lai's "Advanced Topics" class this semester, on Fourier analysis plus enough functional analysis to get by (since the University can't afford to offer functional analysis as a regular class anymore). It's not obviously a good use of my time, but now that I've started, I have to see it through. I could try to tell a story about impact: I am leveling up my math chops, which will be useful for understanding natural abstractions or singular learning theory or mechanistic explanation, which will be useful for—but maybe it's less embarrassing to not try to sell a story. Call it luxury consumption during garbage time. I've lived a good life, in some ways if not others. I could choose to drown in oceans of regret over all the songs I never finished and stories I never wrote and math I never learned when I was young, in the before-time when there was still enough clock in the timeline for these things to matter—or I could choose to do something with the time I have now, which doesn't.
On Wednesday 16 September, the class had its first examination. (When I had dropped by office hours on Monday, Prof. Lai had said I could take it, but that he might not grade it.) I hadn't prepped enough and did poorly, blanking on two parts. I didn't hand in the paper, but GPT-6 Astra later gave it 58%.
After enjoying lunch and dancing at the mall, I walked back to campus for the math department's occasional seminar. On a whim, I had recently ordered a custom branded department tee (in Hebrew, with the thought of provoking a reaction from the other analysis professor, who is a big