Shiny

I'm getting married! I have a shiny ring to prove it, too! Wearing a ring is kinda weird, though. It's kind of like having a band-aid on your finger. I keep playing with it. But band-aids don't catch the light, they aren't blue, and people don't keep asking to look at them. In a word, I'm really happy. And C-'s very happy. Life is good.

But now I have to plan a wedding . . . the only good thing about this is that when it's all over, I get to be married. Ok, it's also a great way to get far-away family and friends to come visit. Otherwise, I get headaches even thinking about planning this thing. Why does it have to be so complicated?

My ideal wedding would actually be a week-long back-packing trip. (Instead of a veil, I would just accumulate tree-bits in my hair.) We'd hike up to the top of something super tall. Then we'd declare ourselves husband and wife by virtue of having surmounted a sufficient amount of mountain. And then we'd hike down. We would hunt our wedding feast and our cake would be forest berries. Unfortunately, this is impractical, and no-one but me would be super stoked about it. Especially not my grandparents. They're super super awesome, but not in the hiking-up-mountains sort of way.

Actually, there's another cool thing about getting married. I've decided to make my wedding dress. Well, I'll try it. We're getting married over a year from now, so if I accidentally make a Franken-dress, I can just buy one a few months ahead of time. There's no pressure. I just get to play at dress-making.

This is a fantastic way to procrastinate. I've spent hours and hours looking at photos online, in order to design my dress. Sooo many hours. And even more hours looking at photos to "design" my dress, which is what happens when the internets suck you in. You feel a compulsion to view every single page on the web, and this compulsion has absolutely nothing to do with any practical purpose. I swear, there was a day when I literally saw every web page. Well, ok, maybe just the ones with pictures of dresses . . .

I've also learned a lot about drafting my own patterns. It's really very interesting. If nothing else, I'll get a bunch of sewing experience out of this project. And maybe a couple of dresses.

Speaking of which . . . whyyyyyy do I have to wear a dress? I don't even like dresses. Maybe I'll design the first dress ever in which you can climb trees and do cartwheels.

I'm gonna tumblr the process, as well. There are a couple of people on the interwebs that made their own dresses. But not so many. And the best thing about the internet is that you can get a million and one examples of how to do anything. Except make your own wedding dress. So I'll just throw my story into the pile. Who knows? Maybe I'll help someone. Or, I can just believe I'm helping someone, and be smug. That's cool, too.

So that's been the past couple of months.

Well, that and actually getting work done. I swear, I have a work complex. I don't work 12-hour days, and then I feel guilty about this. Well, I work rather less than 12 hours a day. I just need to work a bit harder, and stop feeling bad. But were's the fun of that?

In all seriousness, I've finally felt like I'm making real progress on my paper. It's been written for a month now, but it was written so poorly that my advisor could hardly look at it. But I'm seeing a path forward now. I've almost finished a summary. It's made me re-organize the whole thing.

Maybe surprisingly, since I do math, I've found that the most helpful thing is to treat the paper as if I were telling a story. Once upon a time, there was a surface . . . and on that surface, lived a little geodesic. But then the geodesic grew and grew until he didn't fit so well on the surface any more. He found himself tangling up and crossing over himself. This was very uncomfortable, so he asked his geodesic-friends for help.

"What do I do, you guys?" he asked.

"We don't know!" said his friends. "We're all knotted up as well"

"Yeah!" said his best friend, Bob, " you've got it better than me. Look how tangly I've become."

And so the geodesic went in search of a way to become untangled . . .

Ok, now I've got to go back to writing up this story. I'll set up a wedding dress tumblr soon, though, and then I'll cross-reference it here.