Success, like Time, is relative

Success, like Time, is relative

 

            Less than five percent of the United States population will ever take a class in physics. Of those who take physics in high school at the advanced level, something around thirty percent of the students will pass at the end of the year. The material covered is intensively math based, revolving around complex concepts which explain all things rudimentary and sophisticated in the physical world, from the micro to the macro level and all things in between. For those who decide to tackle the challenge, it is a rare honor to succeed, and I am not among the successful.

            I call Lucas Zucker often to get help on my physics homework, which has been beyond me in many ways. He speaks kindly and slowly, and in the end I usually see that the thing I have been struggling with for half-an-hour is, in fact, simple. Luke is getting an A, as with the rest of his classes. Of the two tests we’ve had so far, I’ve failed both with flying colors. It really takes a sense of flare to fail the way I do. The first test did nothing to determine. I was far from the only one to fail, and I acknowledge that I am not the most logically minded person in the world. Sticking with the class I felt the tension ease. Perhaps I was like a ball being rolled down the hill. My learning curve was one with a constant acceleration, increasing competency over time. I’m thinking now that perhaps I am more like a ball being tossed into the air, whose fastest velocity is at it’s release, slowing down as it rises due to the pull of gravity, until coming to zero.

            I took my second test with confidence in most strokes of my pencil. My fingers seemed to clumsily perform the correct dance across the keys of my calculator. Like an object in motion, I seemed to have stayed in motion, though at an admitted slower pace. I recognized the questions, and caught many of the tricky parts of questions that had been thrown in my direction. I turned in the test and went to my next class with a feeling of accomplishment.

            Today I saw my test. 23/44. Roughly fifty-five percent. This one hurt. To know that I had put so much effort – so much studying, hard work, and love (yes love) – into my assignments; to walk out confidently from the test, only to find that I had failed to answer all but two of the questions completely right, was immeasurably cruel. I couldn’t help wondering what Mr. Weldele thought about my capabilities in the class. I had to wonder about what I was going to do. There was the test, right in front of me, mark after mark after mark against me in what seemed to be the most sympathetic of blue pens from a man who probably wished that I forgot to come in on my own time and see my grade. The hardest was the attempt to maintain composure, and not to hop onto my desk and scream, “FUCK GODDAMNIT SHIT SAD-ASS SONS-OF-BITCHES FUCK THE REVERSE OPERATION OF TAN!”

            I practiced breathing exercises on the way home. It is the one reason outside of expenses that I am happy not to have my license. I grant myself a buffer between school and the things at home that would inevitably be hurled against a wall. So I walked, and I thought, and I got misty eyed and my head hurt a little bit. I kept thinking about right triangles. I thought about my mentor whose infinite scientific wisdom I was putting to shame with my piss-poor knowledge of vector equations. I thought about how badly I wanted to be a scientist when I was little, and I thought about who I was really taking this class for, and why? Have I been trying to take this class to prove a point or to say something? Was everything I said about my passion for physics lust a lie to talk my way into the class? Had I ignored every lesson that my mentor and I went over in his work shop. Surely I learned something from about vortices and coronal winds from our experiments.

            Today was the only day it rained since I’d gotten back three months ago. So as I stare out my window now, I think about the silver linings around each cloud, and about the three kids who passed the test at the end of the year and improved their grades. I’m also thinking about the comforting words that Mr. Weldele has been seemingly chanting all year about how he would rather see someone walk out of his class feeling as if they had learned something worth-while, despite hell or high water, then someone who took the class for the grade and the credits, and never thinks about it’s further reaching implications.

            I am taking physics because science has always been part of my life, and I love to understand how the world around me works. I love struggling for forty-five minutes on mundane problems to prove points that I child can say without thinking. I’m not good at it. I might even be terrible, but I love it. So when I was walking home, I thought about that ball some bastard tossed into the air. It reaches it’s maximum height, and happily rests at one place. If, as is absolutely necessary, it is thrown at some degree away from ninety, it will continue to travel forward even when it’s vertical acceleration is at nought, and as it plummets, it will land back in my hands having achieved the same velocity as when it started. As with that damned ball, I am going to struggle and struggle and struggle, and in my beautiful sacrifice of time, perhaps I will come out of the door on the last day having experienced the effects of a rewarding reaction.

            .

Corvus Corax

Corvus Corax

 

Un-kosher scavenger of Carrion,
Devourer of lambs and crops;
Scourge of the agrarian,
Of corn and coral drops.

 

He who gave thee right to fly
Must surely bear regret.
Disgusting fowl Athena cursed,
Might you explain thee yet?

 

“Know thee, I bear no brunt with you.
I curse your species not.
But grant my kind it’s given due
‘fore casting out our lot.”

 

“In India, we Bali Kakkaa
take offerings for the dead.
We harbor fateful omens
To those marked on hand or head.”

 

You harbingers of death and doom
Once ravaged land with suns,
‘till heroic Houyi shot nine down,
and spared by mercy, one.

 

“This one crow spared still flies for thee,
to rise and set his sphere.
His plumage sweeps sky gracefully,
‘till by night he disappears.”

 

Into the night your “eh-aws” call
To taunt the tender soul.
Marking men as brutes, or avarice,
Our honor you extol.

 

“When Tenzin Gyatso, the Lama’s son
was robbed inside his home,
We guarded ever vigilant,
And saved him all alone.”

 

“Men abandon men alike
and pride in lust and greed.
A murder is a tender herd,
Hon’ring filial piety.”

 

“We wise beastss pity all you souls
who cry that we are cursed.
Though one day our time may take it’s toll,
Arrogance will take you first.