Hi and thanks for subscribing to my newsletter! This is not a usual edition of these letters but rather just an essay to mark the end of the year and my birthday. These last few weeks have been a whirlwind of end-of-semester research meetings, last-minute grading, exam proctoring and holiday travel and I ended up writing the bulk of this letter on an eight-hour flight from New York to Amsterdam, one of the stages of making my way home to Croatia. I have not spent Christmas and my birthday at home or with my whole family since 2012 so this is a somewhat special year for me. I am lucky to be able to pull this off, especially with my boyfriend by my side. Our time in Croatia so far has been pretty relaxed and filled with good food and familiar, nostalgia-triggering landscapes. I hope you are also having a good holiday week and enjoying some time off. Regular letters will resume in January and I want to wish you all the absolute best in the year we will have already plunged into by then!
NUMBER THEORY*
“… the prospect of fourteen. That summit age I arbitrarily picked, resolving it stood for what I now wonder might be a vacant pursuit: some cooked-up idea of having made it without divining what this unspeakable ‘it’ marks or means. Or more humiliatingly, what it proves. When I turned fourteen, my sixteenth birthday newly assumed fourteen’s folklore. Then eighteen. Followed by twenty-four. And so on, and so on. Recently, I’ve heaped extra faith into thirty-three’s double springs; conceiving in its future roundness the calm of an absorbed, less wobbly world where I’ve developed a better sense of humor and experience with less acuity, the blow of life’s ups and downs. Come thirty-three, I’ll certainly valorize thirty-six. I’ll reason it’ll supply me with securities I have yet to fathom and eccentricities that permit me to slip out of my sensible mind. That I believe some big, whopping sign might one day parachute down and alert me to my arrival, is, I realize, foolish.”
Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood
“Instead of trying to build lots of ways to protect myself from the world I am trying to plant myself deep into the earth by making lots of stuff I love and want to share with people. So when I feel unmoored – and I will, eventually – I’ll have so much of me just growing around me, to comfort me and to bring me back home.”
Arabelle Sicardi, Hi Can We Talk About Love Please (August 2nd Newsletter)
I remember lying on my back in my childhood bedroom, on the carpet covered with a pattern of a cartoon town with many roads my brother was meant to race toy cars on, my mom trying to stretch one of my hamstrings, probably the left one since a doctor had told us I was a few millimeters shorter on that side. (I still think about that asymmetry, try to detect it when my legs feel stretchy and more springy than I thought they could, malleable like a warmed up rubber band, three quarters of the way into a hot yoga class.) I imagine I had to have newly become a teenager, a word we use in Croatian even though our language does not enforce the hierarchy between the last few syllables of twelve and thirteen. My mom was saying that if I ever got curious about sex or boys (always boys) I could talk to her, and I said maybe I’d want to have that conversation when I was older, when I was fifteen. From watching TV and reading books and magazines, I had gathered that by fifteen maybe someone will have kissed me and maybe I would be curious and eager instead of intimidated and anxious. In reality, fifteen was unremarkable. A boy kissed me much, much later and I am not sure I liked it, just as I am not sure I at all liked being fifteen.
This year marked my tenth living in the United States and saw me enter the fifth year of graduate school or, as I phrase it when I worry someone may mistake me for the kind of student that has to do homework and gets to take breaks, the fifth year of my doctoral work. These are numbers that feel round and significant, a callback to that fifteen. Three days after Christmas I will also be turning twenty-seven, a number that feels much more prickly and rough, shaded darker by pop-culture nonsense. It too in reality means nothing.
Assigning meaning to birthdays and anniversaries always leaves me with the same feeling as when I say I will only sleep for five more minutes – adding in a number sets a sharp boundary on a tendency that might get out of control, makes a shortcoming or a lapse in judgement seem more objective and more controlled. When I snooze my phone, and it has been fighting me with more and more settings introduced every time its software updates, and move the alarm forward, I usually know whether I will really be awake in five minutes or not and the action of checking and scrolling and clicking is just an act I put on for myself. It’s a ritual meant to convince me that I do have self-control and a plan, and this is all just a part of it. When I do oversleep, the extra minutes still trigger a feeling of guilt, regardless of whether I had previously sleepily recognized that my ritual may just be a lie. At ten years, five years and twenty-seven years, I am not quite sure whether the ritual has worked or if I have overslept way past my pre-determined extra time.
The past year is not hard to quantify as everything around me seems to require compiling numbers. There is the number of papers I have published and the number of projects I did not finish. The number of hours I have spent teaching and the number of yoga classes a studio membership can buy. The number of likes on pictures of oatmeal and noodles on my Instagram and the number of frequent flyer miles I earned on trips to the East Coast and various conferences. The number of events I have helped organize and the number hours I spent on the picket lines all the way back in March. The number of grainy video-calls home and the number of late-night text messages to my boyfriend. The number of times I have played The Sciences and Dirty Computer and the number of miles on my new running shoes (and my old). The negative balance on my credit cards and the number of filled pages in my research notebooks. The number of quizzes graded on a Saturday morning and the number of to-go black coffees (no cream, no sugar) at my favorite coffee shop. The number of steps on my Fitbit (past what it would take to walk across the long side of Italy) and the number of these letters – clocking in at 49 before the year fully runs out.
I enjoy the irony of all these numbers threatening to summarize me, to compile some sketchy picture of what I just might be about, when my job is so devoid of numbers. By design, you should be able to plug in any number at the very end, once the theory has been proven to be sound. My students often make this mistake: they plug in the numbers too early and make it impossible to find a mistake later. When they show me their scratch work, cluttered with too many significant digits and two few symbols to actually denote their significance, I joke about not having seen a number in years. Dammit Jim, I’m a theorist, not an engineer. A ‘plus or minus one’ difference should mean nothing in my realm.
A few years ago, my boyfriend and I were in Sacramento because I was presenting at a conference and we thought spending a few days in California together would be fun. My talk went well but the town was disappointing and had made us glum, the kind where there is at least one night when you stay in at a basement AirBnB and watch Chopped instead of venturing out into the scorching heat. One night a stranger talked our ears off in a bar, rudely inserting his ranting about politics into what might have otherwise been a pleasant night for just the two of us and the local crowd participating in something like a guitar-centric open mic. At the conference banquet no one else wanted to sit at our table so we ate two pieces of cake each and felt sugar-bad the next day. At some point I got my period while at some other researcher’s talk and, rushing to the restroom, felt as ambushed and ashamed as I would always feel when such disaster struck when I was a teenager. This only made me more gloomy and on the last day when I conveniently decided that none of the early morning talks were relevant for my research and we struggled to venture anywhere further than under the un-seasonally heavy covers our hosts provided, I remember telling my boyfriend I had expected to be different at twenty-five, a better person by that point in time.
By the time they were ringing in the end of twenty-six, my parents had already had me, they had had jobs and my father had been on the front, serving in the Croatian military and fighting for the independence of the country I will be living in. That has always seemed like a high bar to clear even though I have heard the other side of that story as well, the side where they were broke and confused, and happy to share a yogurt and make some sad cheese-and-pickle sandwiches for dinner. Or at least that is the version of the story that I remember. My parents’ has never really been a success story and I have known that for years, yet the need to compare, to use their template to judge whether I am a Real Grown-Up Person, has stuck with me and had been one of the things weighing on me, other than thick covers and side-effects of negroni week, that morning in Sacramento.
On the morning of my twenty-sixth birthday I was in Brooklyn with my mom (waking up early because she was jet-lagged) and my boyfriend (waking up late because he is a graduate student) and on a video-call with my research advisor. It was the last day when we could submit a finished manuscript to a pre-print archive and still have it count as something we had accomplished in that calendar year. There was some technical trouble, a stray bracket in the LaTeX code or maybe an improperly formatted plot, and we could not make it work. My advisor had called another of her students on her phone and was looking at me through my laptop screen but talking to them instead. We never figured it out and the paper was only published, first as a pre-print then a peer-reviewed journal article, well into the next year. I am too old to have been born with a keyboard at my fingertips, so I buy into all of the digital superstitions – when you really need a piece of tech to work on short notice, the ghosts in the machine will inevitably turn against you and the whole thing will always fail. I was therefore more tired and irked than I was disappointed. Further, I had taken it somewhat personally that my advisor called on my birthday while she knew I would be out of town and spending time with people I love the most but see rarely. This had all become just a thing that I do – Brooklyn, boyfriend, holidays – and she had invaded and interrupted it.
There is a term that experts on grief use to describe situations in which a tragedy has occurred but there will likely never be any definitive closure, like a loved one going missing. This is called ambiguous loss. Ambiguous loss is difficult because it can only be dealt with by keeping in mind two conflicting ideas. For instance, a person might have died, or they might not have, and even when one becomes much more likely than the other, when a number would suggest resolution, the pain present still lives in the space between the two choices. In the world that we live in today, the one where I live at least, thinking about what it means to be a Real Grown-Up Person induces a similar feeling of loss. Maybe there is still a chance for me to have the life I imagined adults had when I was a child and also maybe there is not. The adult version of me that has matched my parents by age twenty-six, that has successfully chased the vestiges of the white-picket-fence paradigm of the fifties has probably gone missing but there is always a faint chance that she will come back. Do I mourn the person I have not become when I could technically still become her? In the end, she may just be an arbitrary yardstick, just another thing I have thrown into my thoughts to convince myself I am truly being objective in my choices (impossible), just as meaningless as thinking a number that feels culturally round would say something about my development as a person.
(Do you know there’s such a thing as real and imaginary numbers? Of course, you do – the latter square to something negative.)
The truth is that at almost twenty-seven I have checked off a number of boxes that I was just never told to put on top of any of my imaginary lists. I’ve rented apartments, taken out loans, filed taxes and visa applications, presented and published original research work, been given awards and fellowships. Other graduate students have asked me for research and career advice and I have officially mentored more than a handful younger physicists. A few weeks ago, a friend told me they would pay to see me moderate any panel discussion dealing with a difficult topic and a few days before Christmas another texted me from a different state to ask for baking advice while making cookies with their mom. A flight attendant once asked me to do her make-up because she liked my eyeliner so much. I have lived in a foreign country by myself for ten years and made it less foreign to me and myself less foreign to it. I made enough friends along the way to find a surprise postcard or package in my mailbox a few times a year. I have dated my boyfriend almost as long as I have been working on my PhD and even though I sometimes fail to recognize it because of the physical distance that is so often between us, we have made habits and rituals of our own. We have built up the kind of togetherness that could be called ‘family’ and that may be so much closer to what I want than the small apartment, the small paychecks and the even smaller baby (born prematurely because I had to be a pain from day one) my parents had at my age. It is not so much that choosing the academic path and the endurance sport that it is has prevented me from becoming a Real Grown-Up Adult as much as I just have to recognize that either I will have to mourn the ambiguous loss of that person for years to come or reshape her to be more forward-looking and less gloomy. For years I have spearheaded a crusade for various older relatives and acquaintances to recognize that what I do – research and teaching – is a job and not a golden ticket granting an extended school-dictated adolescence. I am consistently surprised that I have to convince myself of that every once in a while as well, even though my paycheck and my workhours speak for themselves very loudly most days of the week.
In a letter buried deep in my always cluttered inbox, one that I uncovered in the most recent attempt to dig up something useful from underneath all of the digital marketing debris, writer Arabelle Sicardi brings up a notion of treating your world like a garden, planting seeds and nourishing seedlings so that even when times get tough there is something growing around you and some roots to refer back to. It made me think of a basil plant a student had once gifted me. Instead of bringing the plant home I set it up to grow by the window in my office so that my officemates could enjoy the distinctive smell and vibrant green of its leaves whenever they came in. Eventually I left for the East Coast and in my absence the plant first blossomed and then dried up. For a few weeks though I was happy to see the sun that peeks into the office in the summer months nourish it instead of helping old exams, piled by the window way before my time, fade deeper into lack of significance. Sicardi, of course, is not talking about actual plants but rather relationships and habits; their garden is what they want to point towards the world instead of a shield and be better instead of simply being more grizzled, more jaded and more tough. I do not often consider how being better can mean being less hard, how it can mean letting go of numbers and milestones and growing to be softer and more malleable instead. Like a vine or one of those plants you always see scaling the walls of stuffy academic red brick buildings, maybe we need to grow to be able to bend and adjust and penetrate new spaces without breaking and being sharp and brittle. And once we have learned to bend into a new mold without breaking, we can extend the notion of softness to others and become better by making space for them to bend and intertwine and let go of their own jagged edges, the kind you get in those drawings where numbered dots are connected by straight lines to reveal some approximate rendition of a shape or a figure.
Chances are, twenty-seven will feel a lot like twenty-six and the numbers will be there to show it. I hope for even more frequent flyer miles and cautiously plan on an expansion of my publication list. I know I can add some more mileage to my running shoes and that will remain a comfort. Then there are new metrics I have been trying to invest in more and more with every recent year: more minutes spent with friends, more dinners hosted in my apartment, more visits to favorite restaurants and more words that can nourish and sustain relationships with people whose mere presence and small acts of care and kindness help me keep moving moderately forward and help me keep whole**. Ultimately, though, at twenty-seven, I want to spend more time populating and seeding the space between the numbers, not leaving any spot barren so that when an unexpected turn comes, as they always do, I can bend without too much strain, crackles and sharpness.
Best,
Karmela
* Number theory is a subgenre of abstract (pure) mathematics which studies numbers in the sense of prime numbers or integers. In a sense, number theory is arithmetic on steroids as the object it concerns itself with are familiar to everyone, yet the open questions are quite complicated and require mathematical sophistication (such as understanding structures like rings or modules). One open question is whether any odd perfect numbers (a perfect number is a positive integer equal to the sum of all of its positive divisors except for itself) exist, another is the famous Goldbach conjecture that states that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes but has not been proven in general (since 1740s!).
** This includes you and all of my other readers – I am beyond thankful for your time, attention and patience.