Glimmer of hope on a rainy day.

There's something about not being in the environment that one is used to that makes one think "I don't know jack." I've been feeling that way frequently lately - every time I open one of my GRE study books. I feel incompetent and silly and like I'm in completely the wrong place - I seem to conveniently, in my self-unfriendly thoughts - forget that for the last four years, I've done little else but math, in multiple languages and multiple locations. I don't know why I feel like graduation ripped away my confidence - I don't think that's the effect it's supposed to have. But today, crammed into the corner of a café in the Inner Sunset on a rainy day, with a great friend that I'm getting to know better, I was reading some of my "baby math" for the general GRE this Wednesday, and they cover just a teensy bit of probability on page 80 of the math review. And I just felt myself smiling again, remembering Wahrscheinlichkeitsräume and the rest. I don't quite feel like my old self yet, but it was fun to feel the flicker of my studying-self, the one that didn't want classes to end, the one that got up ridiculously early to be able to take my time with math homework just for the hell and pleasure of it, the one who slept with a manifold calculus book next to my pillow. I'll find my way back.