Tea and Math

Just finished a pot of tea and tried to figure out some math. Discovering a challenging bit of math to work out is both agitating and exciting. Kind of like drinking a pot of caffeine. So now the tea and math in my body are fighting inside me, somewhere in my stomach I think, and it's giving me butterflies.

The math is trying to throw me into math-land. For anyone who does math, you know that math land is quite far from people land. For instance, if a person tries to ask you how it's going while you're in math land, there's quite a long delay between when they talk and when you receive their message. And your replies come out rather distant . . .

The tea is trying to make me alert, thereby pulling to keep me in people-land. Currently, I'm on the side of the tea, 'cause I've gotta tutor very shortly, and you can't explain stuff to people if you can't interact with them properly. But the math has a point, too, in that maybe, if I think about that challenging thing a little longer . . . just maybe . . .

And so goes the metamorphosis into a full-fledged mathematician, I guess.