“lay” vs “lie”

Zero dollar day.

Lost some sleep last night to the voices. At one point I was thinking how the story of my spiritual life is largely a story of bitterness and failure, and I was leaning into the negative, despairing emotions of that thought, and found I was buoyed by seemingly external forces. A woman’s voice said, “Not-for-profit,” which served to counteract my usual tendency to characterize such actions as likely being self-serving in some way. Part of me was still trying to fight against the effort, though I could find no justification. I could find no malice in it.

I do have trouble accepting help, and there are good reasons for that. Just because I can see that there are good reasons for my defensiveness, that doesn’t mean that it’s always appropriate.

Slept late and got started late. Didn’t get as much math done as I’d hoped. Did wander off this evening and read about an old, basic topic (discrete time random walks) just because I wanted to. Just because it seemed like a unit of math that should be familiar to me. I still want to do this (be a mathematician) properly. With a focus on the material, and not on the career-advancing efforts. The intersection is not empty, but neither is the symmetric difference. Felt good to do it my way.

Played guitar for an hour, and I’m likely to only write for 1/2 that. I’m tired and would like to lie down early. (I still don’t have “lay” vs “lie” straight. I should probably get that worked out.)

I did find out that the solution to a problem I’ve been worrying for a few days now is famous, and is called Lévy’s Zero-One Law. So now I get to make sense of the proof of that. It follows from Doob’s martingale convergence theorem, which I’m having trouble finding a proof of.

Had a meeting with the current, outgoing chair of the math department at my current school. He wrote me a glowing review, suggesting to the dean that I be hired on again for next year. If they choose not to hire someone full time, then I’ll lose my health insurance mid-pandemic. That is less than ideal.

Living in this country makes me worry that eventually I’ll have a health issue that will bankrupt me, even if I have health insurance. Even little stuff is insanely expensive (like my Lyme disease test). That, or the cops get violent with me again.

Shit’s coming to a head here in this shithole country.

I scanned Trump’s twitter feed earlier, just to see if he’d issued any orders to his more violent followers, and the whole feed is pure poison. So stupid and mean, a vein of pure lies. A creature of pure toxicity. We’re at about 14.5 days now. There’s a big crowd of brain-dead right-wing shit-heads converging on DC for the 6th. We’ll see what happens. A (the?) leader of the “proud boys” got arrested for ripping a “black lives matter” banner off a black church and burning it. I guess he’s saying they don’t. Like if you’re anti-Antifa, doubling that negative just leaves you with the “fa.”

“Has Antifa killed anybody?”

“Not since the 40’s.”