Of course

Yesterday I drew the number 293. It's a prime number ("I argue that this is trivial" - Professor Fulton Gonzalez; and yes, the solution he was talking about was indeed trivial, but it didn't seem like it to the untrained eye at ALL, especially after 70 minutes of straight nonstop lecture) and I wanted to have a chance to draw again. Apparently my dad has pro-gambling genes, so he made sure he never gambled. I will have to do the same.

Yesterday, I wasn't gambling though. I was drawing the registration number for my courses. 293 is solidly in the lower half of the numbers, so I will be registering an hour and 15 minutes later than I could've, which is good, because I haven't picked my courses yet. It being true that I've taken exclusively math, French, and Japanese courses at Tufts (with the exception of a half-credit computer science course), I really have no preference on what I take here, as long as I get into the right level of Japanese language courses. I'll probably take the introductory economics course (if it doesn't fill up before I get there) and one of the sociology courses. I'll have to pick the one that's less popular, because I don't really want to have to go back and change my registration tomorrow. You're supposed to come with your form ready, so you have no chance to know which courses have filled up by the time you got there.

My roommate has 17. Oh, if only I could trade numbers with him; I would have my differential equations professor's favorite number. (At like 9 AM in the morning I would be the only one laughing at his ridiculously awesome example of "17" being a constant of motion that did not satisfy some weird equation thing. He would use the number whenever he could.) Another prime number.

Yesterday, also, I didn't sleep well. I won't go into why. It has something to do with the color blue, though.

In Japan, I have seen the katakana コース used for the word "course." This would mean that the question "What courses are you taking?" would most directly translate, for a Japanese person, to "What course are you taking?". Of course, rarely is there a distinction in Japanese between plural and singular, so maybe I'm wrong. But the latter question is more interesting. What course am I taking? Should my class choice really be as random as the lottery number choice was? Of course not. I went to the faculty introduction session and basically found which professors I really, really liked, and I think I'm going to pick based on what I saw. Except I don't fully remember which of the non-Japanese professors (most professors weren't Japanese) I liked. Hmm, maybe I trust randomness more than I thought. What's the likelihood that choosing my "course" here badly would do me harm? Not much, really, as long as I don't choose upper level.

And how random is it that I'm here? I dunno, but I like it...
Alex