because apparently reasonable indexing is for chumps.

Did the second half of orientation which included an introduction to our library person and the university’s social media group who tried to seduce us to Instagram. (I will not be joining Instagram. I’m far too grumpy for Instagram.)
I got both my technical problems solved, and then wandered away for lunch. When we all came back a group of second year students told us some useful (and other less useful) things about living in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere Iceland. They recommended being on Facebook (as nearly everything here is conducted on Facebook) (I will not be joining Facebook. My primary problem at this point is that every time I bump into a new thing that has a Facebook, I’m like, well this isn’t worth joining Facebook for. and then once every few years I look back and I wonder whether the aggregate of the all the things was worth joining Facebook for. And I have thus far decided No, and have remained not on Facebook. It’s very peaceful).
The general point of the older student’s chitchat was Don’t Worry! There Is Stuff To Do! and this kind of thing always baffles me (and then reminds that I am, in fact, a little strange), because why would you need this much help being entertained?? I can borrow ebooks from my library and I can go walking through town, and really, what else could I possibly want? There’s a bakery in town, that settles basically all my vices in one fell swoop. Also what would possess me to go downhill skiing in avalanche country?
Then we were taken on walking tour of town which was actually just up and down the main drag (such as it is) and ended at one of the bars, at which point I peeled off and went back to the apartment. I also forget that other people drink actually at all, and so it always a little shock when free beer is presented as a self evident incentive as opposed to a cue to stay in for the night.

The place I’m living used to be a house that was then cut into three apartments, and each apartment has three students in it. My third of a third of a house is up two truly terrifying twisty staircases, with kitchen and living room on the second floor and bedrooms on the third. Medieval siege engineers would kill for my stairs in their towers they are so steep and corkscrewed. My room in particular in entirely under the eaves, so the whole roof is slanted to the point I can only stand upright in about 2/3 of the room. But also I have a skylight and I can’t complain.

While I washing my dishes after dinner, my roommate spun around and looked at me and asked if I had ever read The Prince (which I have, once, on a whim). He looked briefly baffled than anyone who wasn’t a political science major had bothered, and then launched into a rant with mostly correct Machiavelli opinions, which from there turned into an accidentally hour long conversation about American and Canadian politics and also what we each find irritating about philosophers (so here’s the wild thing about humanities majors – if you read something that they recognize, like Machiavelli or Plato or Shakespeare, it will help them bond with you, despite the fact that they don’t get automatically emotional about Mars Rovers or tree frogs and still think you’re fundamentally kinda weird).

I spent most of Saturday figuring out how to build an origami set of six intersecting five pointed stars, where each star is usually it’s own color (making it fun to look at and easy to assemble). Instead in this one each unit has two colors so each cluster of five points had one color instead. My brain hurts, but I’m quite delighted with the result. It occurred to me late yesterday that’d I’d spent basically all of that day in a small white walled room not speaking to anyone, and that maybe this is why I’m so baffled when other people want to Do Things. I am a creature of simple, often stationary, pleasures.

I also looked up how much daylight I’m loosing, because when I moved into this room the sun came in directly through the skylight and traced a path on my floor. It has been five days and it no longer does that because the sun is too low in the sky now. According to this website I’m losing about 8 minutes of daylight a day, and that will continue accelerating until the equinox in late September, at which point it will continue to get darker but now thank god more slowly. I do want kinda want to graph the loss of sunlight because I think it’ll make a pretty sinusoid. That being said, I feel like I’m going to give people the wrong impression about how much math I do; I am, at best, a recreational mathematician when I have a particular question I want answered.

I’m still having a good time, and I get to go to school tomorrow!