A few things I'm learning/realizing.

1. I really, really like that in Santa Cruz, "going to stare at the ocean" or "look at the water" is a completely legitimate way to spend time. And yeah, there are tourists coming through (I've only been here a month, I probably still fit into that category) but I really get the feeling that a lot of permanent residents still do that, too. As I think they should. My grandfather used to make a real art of it - clambering nimbly down the rocks we call rip-rap (enormous boulders or rocks that are real rocks, but fake in the sense that they weren't always where they are now - namely piled up at the tops of the beaches in Santa Cruz up against the cliffs, to help prevent erosion from the pounding waves) with a folding chair under one arm and a mug (not a travel mug!) of piping hot tea in the opposite hand. He'd find a space on the rock shelf flat enough to unfold the chair and he would sit, looking out over the tidepools to the ocean and drink his tea. I remember going with him and sitting on the ground, wondering how he could stare at it so long without talking, without doing something.

2.  I finally learned the difference between highway and freeway two days ago. Probably, most of you know it already, and it was one of those questions where the answer isn't all that interesting but the act of finally finding it out was very satisfying.

3. This probably won't come as a shock to a lot of my friends - I can envision them quite easily laughing at me as I write this, as if this were a surprise to no one but me  - almost everything makes me think of math. And it's not always the cheesy 'graph lines and functions appear, sketched over the image in front of my eyes' the way we see in movies (okay, sometimes it's like that) -- but it's also how cars move on the highway (the way we react to brake lights, the way the effect ripples backwards and how it changes depending on what caused it), and today, the way the sheet of clouds in the sky looked so incredibly aligned, like a razor blade of clouds slicing the horizon, and from underneath it looked so flat that if you could hang upside down from it, you could surf on that wave until you hit the sunset.

4. I miss math. It's only been about a month and a half since I was working with math every day (be it homework or class) but I miss it and it feels very far away. I know I can change that.