New York, New York

Now I live between a Dunkin' Donuts and a place called the Chirping Chicken on Amsterdam Ave.

The apartment is 1 block from the Museum of Natural history, 2 blocks from central park, and only a 12 minute commute to Columbia.

Moving is stressful, and packing sucks.

But the end result is not so bad.

School has started, which I'm excited about.

A lot of people don't like school, because thinking is hard (especially if you don't like what you're thinking about).

That's unfortunate since you're going to have to think no matter what you do.

It's going to be a really weird semester.

I'm fortunate to be able to attend class, albeit wearing a mask and spread out as far as possible.

But hey, change might be opportunity instead of disaster.

This semester I'm going to be learning about intelligent + connected systems, content storage and distribution, quantum physics of matter, and reinforcement learning.

This is great because those are the exact things I want to be learning about.

I get asked frequently, as do most others my age

'so what do you want to do?'

And my answer to that question, to avoid complication, is usually one thing plucked from the infinite subset of things that can be done.

The real answer is that I want to zip around on my hobie cat.

Honestly, how can you know what you want to do if you can't know the thing you pick will turn out better than an alternative?

Sure, you can be quite certain that going to medical school and becoming a doctor will end up better for you than joining the mafia.

But the differences between two respectable careers are minute, and their trajectories chaotic.

There's simply no way of telling how things will turn out for you.

According to Yuval Noah Harari, Historians early in their careers tend to draw direct causal relationships between events and the things that happened directly before. It's as if what happened was inevitable, and it couldn't have gone any other way.

When in reality, history (including your history) cannot be explained deterministically.

Those more deeply informed about the period are much more cognizant of the roads not taken.

Chaos is the rule, rather than the exception, and that can be frustrating.

But this is not bad.

For example, if you know exactly what's going to happen next, a movie becomes far less interesting.

Why, then, would you want to know exactly what's going to happen next to you?

It's far more exciting to enumerate the possibilities instead.

Last weekend I went to Fire Island to hang out with Willem.

We rode around on bikes, played tennis, figured out why the magnetic field of the earth switches randomly, and swam in the ocean.

There are no cars, only bikes.

I'm happy that I get to continue living with Willem.

This will be the 5th year in a row that we have lived together -- the first 4 at Davidson, this one in the city.

He's about the only thing that is the same, and for that I am thankful.

When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It’s stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities. People, including you, can’t hem you in with their old notions. You get shaken out of your old ruts. You make new, better ruts, with people aiming at better things.