5 rooms clean, 1 to go. …

5 rooms clean, 1 to go. The combination of Jason visiting (who's never been here before), Kevin visiting, and people coming for brunch Sunday gave me good motivation to do a really thorough cleaning job today. Actually did a three-step mop in the kitchen (a) hit worst areas with full-strength cleaner, b) do entire floor with diluted cleaner, c) rinse with hot water and dry (trust me, it needed it)). It's amusing, since none of the people coming by actually care whether my house is clean or not -- in fact, I'll be surprised if Jason or Kevin even notice. But a) I know that having house guests tends to mess things up, so that it's easier to recover if the place is clean to begin with, and b) it's just a good excuse to get me up off my ass and clean. I was cleaning with the tv turned up loud, so I was reasonably entertained throughout.

After all that, I took a hot bath with satsuma bubble bath, which felt great, and am soon going to go finish that slice of key lime pie I picked up earlier. Mmm...

I'm a little keyed up. Seeing Jason is...complicated. In ways that I don't really feel I can talk about here, since they involve several other people I don't know that well. But overall, I expect it'll be good. Pleasant, fun, maybe a little exciting. He's someone who I've had these odd, intense conversations with -- and then gone years without talking at all. It'll be nice to have some longer conversations, maybe turn into actual friends instead of just very friendly acquaintances. He's another mathematician, did I mention? Mathematicians are marvelous...when they're not maddening and/or muddled. :-)

I have a math geek fetish. What can I say? It's not just to date, either, though I've dated plenty of them. I used to love just sitting in the big room on the second floor of Eckhart Hall (the math building), having tea and cookies with all the math guys, letting the incomprehensible conversation just wash over me. Or hanging out with the grad students in the basement, picking up their little phrases, though I'm not sure I ever had the nerve to use them in conversation they way they did, casually. After a few years, I got at least a few of the jokes, though. "Non-trivial." Heh. That phrase crept in everywhere, along with "non-obvious". I know how to pronounce all sorts of things that I don't understand too. Like co-homologous. Hmm...not sure I actually spelled that right, after all this time. But I know how to pronounce it. No idea what it means. (Don't tell me -- I *like* not knowing.)

I feel like I should have a button: I Was a Teenage Math Groupie. Though actually, I was about twenty when that started, and sadly, it doesn't seem to have ended yet.

I suspect it would extend to physics geeks too, at the very least. But I meet far fewer of those. In fact, I wonder if part of it is simply that the math guys were my first exposure to graduate students. I wanted to be one of them, y'know? Not in math, but a grad student, a scholar, following that slightly incomprehensible path. It took me a while, didn't it? But I'm here now.

Maybe it was that, the grad school thing. Or maybe it was just that they were very smart, and very cute.

Yay, math geeks. :-)