Edited Stream of Consciousness

Um, I’m moving to another country in, let’s check, sixteen days, as of clicking publish.

And I’ve been casually talking about getting a visa and packing and about the program and how it’s going to be a really great experience, like this is something that people do every day, like it’s some work conference or vacation, like it’s normal. This is not normal. This is not Something That People Do. 

Oh, did you hear that, theoretically, if you fell into a black hole, you could be radiated back out slowly as a mass of incoherent photons? 

I mean, people move to other countries all the time, and I’d say that it’s not something that people from my hometown do, but a friend of mine from high school actually is living in Scotland, and another just moved to Albania, and my brother went to China for a year. But it just still seems so out of the ordinary. People go to college, people get jobs, people maybe move to a new city, people maybe come back, people buy houses, people have kids, and all of that is the new normal for twenty-somethings. I feel like my life is a little absurd even in that new normal. 

Oh! And! That Ice Bucket Challenge ridiculousness from last summer? The money actually did go to fund research (among other things, and not all of it has been used yet) that identified a protein that fails in most people with ALS and that, if repaired, can allow damaged cells to heal. 

After what feels like years of waiting, I’m ready to go and I’m excited- I actually had a dream last night about moving in the my new apartment and making friends who disappointingly all had American accents, but I think that’s because my subconscious is self-conscious about our ability to generate appropriate accents. Which, really. Guys. The accents. I’m so pumped. 

And I’ve been taking a dive into content that I’ve garnered from the course descriptions and it’s all been really fascinating. Like, okay, so, if you have a subatomic particle, like a proton, just some tiny thing that quantum mechanics directly applies to, you can’t predict exactly where that thing is going to go like you could with a ball that you throw in the air because, according to the way quantum mechanics is interpreted (the standard Copenhagen Interpretation), the universe is non-deterministic. On the tiniest level, you can’t know what anything is going to do. You can get a statistical probability, but you can’t know. That not-knowing is actually helpful when building a case for free will. You can go here: http://www.iep.utm.edu/freewill/#SH3b for more reading on that. 

Then again, if there are multiverses and mirror universes, then free will is much more of an illusion than we think. You can show this using examples from Darkwing Duck. 

Art from http://acmelimited.com/news/dangerous-darkwing-duck-silk-screen-sneak-preview/

All this is maybe why I’m doing this program in the first place. 

Ah, man, did you see this, though? It's just fantastic and so on point.

Oh, you knew you could make a hologram with stuff around your house and a smartphone, right? I super want to try that. Crafting for science! 

I guess what I’m really saying is that I’m so ready for the next thing, for my next thing, but life is so weird and that induces occasional internal panics. But I think even my brain is done with all this over-analyzation. Ready to be busy enough for regular analyzation. 

Hey, though, there's this Twitter account that's the Count from Sesame Street that just counts. Like, that's it. And I love it. Thanks, internet. Sometimes, you make it all okay.