Ask Emily: 01-27-2003

Hey Lucidish,A lot of people feel this way, myself included at times. I too question the validity of working my entire life in a chosen field that I only tolerably accept only to retire close to death in seeming comfort and wealth, living out my last years on this earth in hollow finery bought by the years of dull and meaningless toil with which I have paid. Indeed, life seems pretty shallow and empty when you put things in those terms, and Society supports and nurtures this path of existence even as it has for the last several hundred years or more. When someone dies, his loved ones gather at his graveside, saying that he lived a good life and excelled in his job in such-and-such a field. He worked well as an accountant or whatever, and his children will follow in his accountant footsteps and run through the maze themselves even as their father did before them. Then they will die and people will say the same things about them. The wheels are already in motion for them to do so as they are with all of us who have approached life in a conventional and societally acceptable fashion. Pretty depressing to think about.I suppose that the key here is to find things in your life that you truly enjoy and that society and it's lame-ass rules has no part in. They should be things that make you happy individually and that you personally exact a great amount of enjoyment and fulfillment from. For me, those things are writing crappy fiction, taking pictures of things that I think are pretty, and generally just being a lazy lout (playing video games, observing other people and their lives, etc). Because I have these things in my life, I am more readily prepared to jump through the hoops that society in this day and age lays out for me. I could be a rebel and rage against the machine, d00d, but to what end? I would be miserable, because as much as I hate to admit it, I do need money to live. That's not going to change, so I might as well make the best of it here while I can. That doesn't mean that I don't hold a grudge against the stupid way that things have to be (eg. taking a retarded standardized test in order to get into grad school so that I can get another degree so that I can make even more money- wtf), but I do what I have to do in order to get by and the things that I enjoy in life make the crappiness of the rest of it ok enough to get by.In any case, if you have no idea what interests you, find those things that make you happy and inspire you as fast as you can. That should be your first and absolute number one priority in your life. Having these things to fall back on or to distract you from the unpleasantness that the world around you has to offer will go a long way in making things ok. They won't be OMG WONDERFUL, because any smart person who is self-aware enough to be dissatisfied with the dumb way in which society today is structured can't help but be rather unhappy sometimes about things in general. It's too easy to wish that one was ignorant and normal such that one could just go through life blind to the inadequacies of the system, but that's not about to happen and I'd personally rather be aware and intelligent, so all that's left is to do what I can in order to be as happy as I can. Find those things that lie underneath the false facade that society offers and live for them. Everything will be ok.

When life gives you lemons, squeeze the juice out of them into a glass and then drink it, telling your friends that it's actually piss. Or something.

Ok,This is a ridiculously easy problem and you probably failed this exam if you can't solve it. There is only one trick to this problem and it isn't even calculus-related. Even I know how to do this one and I suck ass at all forms of math without exception. Well, I'm ok at some forms of simple addition, but only when drunk.The trick here is to simplify things by combining the exponents. This is easy as very easy pie if you remember the exponent rules and that exponents, when multiplied, are added together. This means that your 2x's inside of the brackets when multiplied together actually equal 4x and that you can then cancel this out with the 4x on the bottom of the equation. What you end up with is basically 3x/a and you integrate that and then multiply it by the -e^2x that's outside of the equation. TA-DA!The key here is just to reduce it, d00d. That's what you should look for first things first- before you ever try to tackle any tricky math problem. If you don't reduce stuff right away you end up staring for hours at these problems and thinking that they are assfuckingly difficult when in fact there is just some dumb and pretty simple algebra to keep in mind. Good luck in your math class.

You'll need all of the luck you can get.