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Of I Am Not's design.

Most people never figure out life.

At the age of eleven, I had already solved it.

All the wasted time at school gave me the opportunity to think about my plan, a comprehensive set of logical steps that would get me exactly where I wanted to be.


Step 1: 3D
I had figured out the basics of programming by messing around with the Visual Basic 2.0 demo. In recesses, I'd borrow Chayim's scientific calculator and program my trademark cheating guessing game•-------

if guess=num (num=getRnd(min,max))
if guess=num & min=num & max=num (write "You win!")

on it, or use it to plot out random graphs to see if I could make them look cool. I was on the right track. Okay, so I'd never finished any program more impressive than the guessing games, but anything was doable. So I thought a lot about how 3D graphics were supposed to work. I didn't like the idea of polygons, so I wanted to program a 3D equivalent of pixels, where every object you see is made of tiny cubes in a 3-dimensional grid. It didn't seem like such a hard thing to implement; I just needed to figure out how perspective worked, and the job was half done!

Step 2: Arellian
I had almost finished my logical alphabet, where the connections between letters are perfectly intuitive and logical. I needed to start working on the vocabulary. It would use a modified version of Hebrew's "root" logic, because it just makes everything more sensible. In addition, you could get the opposite of any word by spelling it backwards. And the longer a word, the more specialized its meaning. There would be short words talking about general concepts, so that you could have a basic conversation without having an advanced vocabulary. But adding on more letters to the start and end would add on subtleties and contexts and connotations and iterations. Starting from these rules, I'd eventually deduce the single most logical language in the world. I believed I'd find that in the end, there would only be one solution to this problem.

Step 3: AI
The most important part of intelligence is learning. If I could just make a program that would learn from me, it could figure out all the rest for itself. I gave a lot of thought to how the files would be organized, where each file is a learned behavior and the files are in folders and are all connected to each other but the computer program changes all that on its own. If it saw me acting differently than the appropriate file suggested that a person should act, then it would create another file to go alongside it suggesting an alternate behavior for that context. Then it would have to figure out the more subtle difference behind the two situations, which is just a math problem. When it decided on its own behavior, it would never have exactly the same situations so it'd pick whichever file was closest, and then adjust the programming of that file based on what reaction it got. All pretty straightforward. I'd already picked out a name for my first AI: "Artie". We'd have all sorts of fun together. The Arellian language would now come into use, because any robot would be driven mad by the current languages. Trying to speak to my Artie in English would add years on to the time it'd take to train him!

Step 4: Movies
Once Artie was reasonably independent, I'd teach him English and show him lots of movies so he could imitate famous actors' performances in 3D. If I gave him enough movies to watch, he'd eventually figure out how to play from any script, and with any style of performance! (He'd probably need to organize all the different styles of performance himself, though I could help him out a bit.) Then I'd write a script, a high-stakes time-travel story of some sort. (I was always thinking about the first scene, since the rest would follow once I got that right.) Artie would play all the parts, and it would all use my 3D graphics to look totally realistic, and -Voila!- professional movies by the age of 18.

Step 5: Quests
Once I was able to do movies, I could just make it exponentially more detailed (This is just math, really.) and I'd have some amazing adventure games. I'd just need to design the branching paths so that everything you can do leads to a good movie. All the characters would actually be AI-actors (probably Artie's successors by that point), because you need to be able to talk to them (via a microphone) and it's not conceivable that I could program all that manually. Those would also be futuristic science-fiction stories. I'd brand them as "VCQs", which is short for "voice-controlled quests".

Step 6: Education
Once I knew how to make games, I could figure out how to teach. The trouble with teachers was, they didn't understand anything. They knew what the material was that needed to be taught, but they didn't understand the logic behind the material, and they certainly didn't understand how that could be fun. But I could figure out how to make stuff fun. I'd release some educational software under the heading of "Orot Software", named after my elementary school not because I liked my school the tiniest bit, but because there was more to my plan than that. See, my software (being based on an intelligent evaluation of the player and good game design) would be so much more effective than the school system that within five years, I would utterly replace all schools, and all teachers would be out of a job. So the point of the name was actually going to be to rub it in their faces that I could do their jobs better than them.

Step 7: Whatever
By that point, I'd pretty much have reached the point where I could do anything I liked. Maybe I'd make a comic strip, or maybe an RTS game. Or maybe I'd get to work on that time machine, because I still had no idea how that was going to work.







This didn't happen, of course. I utterly failed to live up to my own standards. My 18th birthday came and went, and three more after that. I've still never gotten serious about figuring out 3D graphics, I never made a language to go with my alphabet, I've never come to understand intelligence, I no longer feel any need to make movies, I don't think I'll be able to ever teach anyone, and the closest I've come to an adventure game is Smilie. I rarely leave this room, and most of the time I've got this nagging feeling in the back of my head that life is supposed to be more than this. Life's supposed to make sense. And it doesn't.

It occurs to me that maybe the sentiment behind the old plan is still there. After all, I still want to do everything. I made a character and a strategy game, and now I'm trying to make a movement game and then an exploration game and then an adventure game and someday a platformer and a role-playing game and a metalude. These are all separate worlds, and we act like they're all one medium. So I can say "I want to be a gamist!", and because it's so simple to understand that it seems like it'll be simple to do. I guess that makes me happy. I can be realistic, and still know that I'm eventually gonna get to step 7. It might just take a bit longer than I anticipated.

74

Most of the things that make me happy are really simple.

Yo Ho, Yo Ho…

I feel no guilt in saying that I get and always have gotten most of my entertainment illegally. I'm afraid that people will despise me, but I'm not afraid that I'm doing the wrong thing. This is just the way the world works now, there's nothing unethical about it.

When I was a kid, almost the only entertainment I had was TV shows. And almost the only TV shows I ever watched (since we never picked up more than two channels) were the Star Trek episodes my father had taped off American TV.

Then I discovered the internet, and I finally was exposed to games. Good games, not the shareware and educational trash which I'd been exposed to before. I found a Game Boy emulator and played through Pokémon Yellow, and then I'd go to school and hand out floppy disks with the same to anyone who'd take 'em. One kid then went out and bought himself a Game Boy so he could play it "for real", having never been exposed to videogames before and therefore not knowing what a rip-off the Israeli prices were.

I played other Nintendo games: Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time. Ah, Ocarina of Time. The game that showed me what games could be. And understand, before piracy I had nothing. I'd never touched a game system. But after playing Ocarina of Time, well, I wanted the next one. I read that a new Zelda game was coming to the Gamecube, and I went out and bought myself a Gamecube.

Every penny of the (literally) thousands of dollars I've spent on games is because of piracy. So don't you look at me like I'm corrupting your economy. The creators who think that every single copy of their work should earn them the amount of money that they've decided on, well, they're just being greedy. If I created stuff, I'd want as many people to experience it as possible. That's the point of creating anything. Getting every last penny you feel you're "owed" is not the point.

And still Nintendo tries to attack me as though I'm some sort of disease. I have the Homebrew Channel on the Wii, so that I can (illegally) play the old games which Nintendo refuses to sell me. Uniracers, in particular. I really wanted to play that on a real game system with a real controller. So I installed the Homebrew Channel, I enjoy the game every now and then, and every time I install a new system update I have to be worried that this is the time they'll catch up to the hackers and prevent me from being able to ever play Uniracers again. They keep trying, and the hackers keep coming up with ways of getting around whatever they set up.

Thank god for hackers.

Now, you might well ask why I bother to pay these corporate slimebags who try to attack me. It's a good question. I could give a whole bunch of rational-sounding answers, but they all feel a bit false to me, even as far as rationalizations usually go. I think there's an element of capitalist indoctrination there, that I feel that if I'm enjoying something enough to pay for it I should make an effort to pay for it. So if I see a decent sale, or some other opportunity to pay for stuff which I've already been enjoying for free, I usually take it. I've played games for literally hundreds of hours on emulators before buying legal copies. Generally used, since the new ones are more expensive than I can afford. Which I guess doesn't make a whole lot of sense- what's the difference between buying a used game and downloading an emulated game, exactly? But that's why I'm categorizing all this under "indoctrination" and not attributing rationality to it.


I'm going to switch topics a little bit and talk about comic books. Comic books are the exception to the general rule that piracy leads to actual purchases. And that's because the illegally-obtained comics are better than the legal ones.

As usual, a brief personal history: as a kid I only knew newspaper comic strips. Calvin & Hobbes, Garfield, Peanuts. That's about all I knew. Oh, and once I was at a friend's house whose father collected comics, and I read his limited-edition "Uncle Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times" hardcover, which I later found out no one was allowed to touch. Uncle Scrooge is amazingly good. (I read it on the computer now.) But the Marvel and DC comics, the superhero stuff, I had no exposure to that. The first time I read a superhero comic, I had already seen the first X-Men movie (which I liked a lot) and the first Spider-Man movie (which I didn't), but superheroes were never "for me", they were what I had heard that other people liked. A classmate in ninth grade let me read a Batman comic, and I'm sure it wasn't a particularly good comic but it somewhat impressed me. Not enough to search out more, mind you. But I could see myself getting involved in a superhero comic.

And then at some point I found out that J. Michael Straczynski, the guy who made all those Babylon 5 episodes I'd downloaded off the internet, was writing Amazing Spider-Man. So I downloaded the entire run up to that point. That's what got me hooked on superhero comics. And every week after that, I'd go into these archaic chat-rooms (Even then they were archaic, but they were the only semi-reliable source I could find.) and download the new comics directly from someone nice enough to share them with me.

Now, it's not like I've never payed for any comics. I have two volumes of Fables (my favorite one and the first), the hardcover of Omega the Unknown, and the entire $90 set of Bone in color. (Bone is my favorite comic ever.) But I also have copies of all three on the computer. And that's because the computer comics experience is so much better.


The enjoyment I get from comics is threefold:

1. The intended entertainment of reading the comic.
2. Collecting and organizing the comics.
3. Sharing the comics and socializing about them.

To be sure, people who read comics on paper can get all three as well. But I would argue that they can't get as much out of the comics as I do.

1. Reading
Comic books are small, and the art is shrunk down to fit on the page. With good art, I want it to be bigger. I was so disappointed when I got that first Bone book and saw how much less of the nuance of the art I could make out than I'd seen on the computer screen. Now, I'll grant you that the quality of the reading is dependent on the quality of the screen. But even with my awful screen, I feel like I'm appreciating the art much better when I can make it whatever size I like.

(There are certain comics which absolutely can't be scrolled through at a large size without losing a lot. Most of David Mack's comics, for instance. But these are rare.)

Comic books are also filled with ads, which of course the illegal scanners take out. So the flow of the story is uninterrupted.

2. Collecting
I've discovered that I really enjoy organizing things. Every time there's a comic I like, I take off the scanner's tag, change the filename to whatever the title is, and put it in a folder which fits into a chronological order of the timeline. Half the fun of a superhero universe (for me) is how it keeps crossing over with itself in new and interesting ways. Because each one is a new and fun challenge.

A few years ago, Marvel had a massive crossover called Civil War which almost everything tied into. Well, not only did I take all the issues I liked and put them in chronological order (That goes without saying.), but I edited the whole crossover together in a way that felt intentional, like the whole thing was one big novel and I was just assembling it. I think I succeeded in organizing and editing the seventy-odd issues that I kept, so that if you start at the beginning and read through issue by issue in order it seems like the whole thing is one story. (Even though that wasn't the intention of the creators!)

That's the beauty of digital files- you can do whatever you like with them. When I see a typo, well, why should I have a typo in my comics collection? I take out the offending page, and I fix it. That's often harder than you'd think. Comic scans are necessarily imperfect, because it's not coming direct from the digital source. Actually printing the thing causes a lot of flaws, and then scanning it back into the computer messes it up further. None of this is especially noticeable while reading, but if I'm editing the file the imperfections need to be consistent throughout the image, so I can only change it by using other parts of the image to patch over it. But here I'm getting too technical. The bottom line is, I can change the images.

I have gone quite far in abusing this ability. During Civil War, there were some issues which added a really interesting element to the overall story I was constructing, but weren't actually good comics. So I'd chop them up! In the most radical case, I took a nearly-unbearable three issues with wasted potential, and edited them down to one 15-page issue which was entertaining. Don't underestimate the power of editing.

And why does a comic need to be exactly 22 pages, anyway? It's because that's the standard length for the paper they're using. In a digital file, it makes no difference! So if there's a back-up story which is really terrible, I can chop it out! And sometimes I do the opposite, adding in pages to the beginning of a comic (before a cover) from earlier issues. Only when there's a good reason for it, of course. But anyway. On a computer, keeping these comics and organizing them into CDs isn't just collecting. It's a creative exercise as well.

3. Socializing
At first I was just doing all this editing for my own benefit. Truthfully, I still mainly am. But I also give the CDs to neighbors now. They wouldn't otherwise read this stuff, and even if they did I imagine they'd only read one or two comics maximum. But I can give them an entire superhero universe in neat chunks of 700 MBs, which they can see what they like in. So I've got two neighbors who I've been giving the discs to, one after the other. It's not unlike how I used to hand out floppy disks in elementary school.

The point of all this is not just to get other people to experience the same things I've experienced (though you know how obsessed I am with that), but also to give topics for conversation. The people I give these comics to are guaranteed to have somewhat different reactions than me, which means I can ask them why and talk about what worked and what didn't and where it all might be going.


Bottom line, digital comics are great. The only legal way to get new comics is to take a train to Tel Aviv (a garbage-dump of a city an hour away) and find a comic store, and then I won't be able to do what I like with it. Sorry, that's not even remotely enticing. Even if I bought the collections, they're much more rigidly constructed than my CDs, because they've only got the space for six or seven issues per book. (Space limitations are so old-fashioned.) I really couldn't go legal without losing a lot.

The trouble with comics piracy is where I'm getting these comics from. First off, every six months or so Marvel's lawyers catch up to me and force the site I'm using to shut down. And then I've got to pick up and find a new place. Each time I start out thinking it's gonna be a temporary source and then I just get more and more comfortable there until it seems really permanent, and then one day the moderators announce without explanation that they will no longer allow Marvel books to be posted.

But it's more than just the running that's annoying. It's the scanners themselves, and the whole community they've built up around them. These people think that because they put a few comic books in a scanner, that they are the kings and queens of the world and should be treated as such. You may not speak to them without complimenting them on what wonderful people they are, or you're banned. And god help you if you say anything which can even be misconstrued as asking when a comic book will be scanned. And if you're not going to be exactly like the scanners, don't bother trying to participate.

The most recent time I tried to get involved in the scanning community was with an issue of Amazing Spider-Man a few months back. The writer went on record that the dialogue of a certain page was a mistake, and he posted a corrected version of the dialogue. So I took the image of that page and started editing. I got it to look the way the writer wanted, which wasn't simple (The dialogue bubbles all needed to be shaped differently!) and took me a few hours. I think it looks really seamless- if you didn't know I'd edited the page heavily, you couldn't notice. Anyway, I thought that maybe this was what I could do for the community that'd given me so much. So I posted my version of the comic, and it was removed a few hours later? You know why? Go on, guess. It's kind of funny really. They said I was disrespecting the scanners! That was hardly the first time I tried to apply myself in the community, but it'll certainly be the last.

Well, whatever. Those are the guys with the comics, so what can you do.


I'd love it if Marvel would start releasing their comics on the internet. I'd pay for them, same as I pay for lots of downloadable games on the Wii. (Just as with the Wii, I'd still illegally get the ones I wasn't willing to pay for.) But it would need to be as good as the illegal stuff, and Marvel will never even conceive of doing that! They'll never give out comics without the ads, and without copy protection, and at the same time as the print comics, and where you can do what you like with it! Because they're a corporation. And corporations are totally clueless.

74

If I were smart enough, my interactions with normal people would be amusing math problems.

I'm not nearly smart enough.

Artificial Intelligence

I don't believe that human beings are random. Strange, sure. Complex, no question. Stupid, probably. But not random. I have always believed that the people around me were predictable systems, though I have always been incapable of making those predictions.

I also don't believe that human beings are rational at the core. It's all emotions on the bottom. The rationality comes later, as a game which is played for emotional reasons. We come up with rational thoughts only when we need those thoughts.

But let's back up. I believe that human intelligence is theoretically reproducible. And I doubt I will see that feat accomplished within my lifetime.

What passes for "artificial intelligence" these days is like a house built from the roof downward. The benefits of such an approach are obvious:

1. From a satellite photo, it looks almost the same.
2. It's affordable to get to that point. (You just need to stop when it gets impossible.)
3. You can do it quickly.

If you're not left with a real house at the end, that's okay. Having a roof over your head's the most important part, so just dig a little hole underneath it where you can sit and you're all set.

But you probably don't see where I'm coming from with that metaphor, so I'll speak plainly. Modern AI projects mimic the actions of people, but not the processes that led to that action. Human intelligence is based on emotions, and the end result of the whole program looks rational at times. Machine intelligence is based on pure rationality, and if the programmer has a sense of humor he'll tack on some faux emotion to make it seem like it's not just a set of functional rules. Though it is.

The problem, as usual, is capitalism. Programmers aren't altruistic, they're pragmatic. AI only exists in any form because the people working on them have already thought of a use for them. There's a specific job in mind, so you keep adding rules until it can do that job and then you stop. This is a dead-end kind of AI programming. Once you've made the program, it can't learn new things, it can't get better, it can't adapt to a changing environment, and it certainly can't do anything even the tiniest bit outside the tiny range of activities it was specifically programmed for.

That may be good enough for a capitalist, but it's not good enough for me. The promise of AI (as I have learned from science-fiction) is having new people in the world, non-human people. These programs aren't people, they're screwdrivers. You know how the movies always start with some simple program like a chess player or a monitoring system, and then it gets smarter and becomes sentient? Well, it can't possibly work like that. Not even in theory. If you make a screwdriver, a screwdriver is all you'll ever have.

If you want real intelligence, the sort of intelligence that learns and grows and becomes a productive member of society, you've got to start from the ground up. And I strongly believe that this is possible. We can do it. But we're not trying.

To actually have artificial intelligence, you need to make a program which functions -from the bottom up!- like a brain. I don't know exactly what that means, because I don't understand how the brain works. But I see the beginning of the path there. The first step is to assume that everything people ever do is the result of a predictable system built on emotions. (Because it is.)

What that means is that whoever's trying to make a machine think needs to understand all the latest theories about both psychology and neurobiology. Only by looking at both the macro and the micro, and theorizing all the while on how the two are connected, can you reach a sufficient understanding of intelligence to start programming it.

No one's going to do this, and if I sound antagonistic toward the people who pretend they are I apologize. It's just disappointment, you understand. But I understand perfectly well that what I'm suggesting requires genius, nearly infinite patience, and a disconnect from the realities of this capitalist, practical world.

It is possible.

A "neural network" is a series of simulated neurons which are connected to each other. That's a start, but there's a lot more than that. There's no intelligence without emotion. Whatever a program is made for, it needs to actually want that, or else those neurons will have no context. Which means that the chemicals behind impulses and emotions need to be studied, to see how a computer program can simulate those aspects of neurobiology.

There are many practical downsides to all this. It would take decades to program this thing. And then it would take more decades to raise it. And once you do, it'll probably turn out that that specific individual you've created isn't good at what you wanted it to be good at. Actually, chances are it won't be good at doing anything at all. The intelligence of a human is tough enough, but you want it to be the intelligence of a competent human? That could take another few centuries. That means studying the differences between the brains of specific people on an extremely minute level. Alternatively, you could introduce evolution into the mix. Have some sort of mechanism for full brain-simulations to reproduce, and only keep the ones that are doing a good job after years of training. It could take a while. By the time you're finished, whatever job you needed to have done is long since obsolete, and you've just used up trillions of dollars with nothing to show for it yet.

I think I like my world better than yours. My world is rational. Yours is just random.

74

When an apparent opportunity is handed to me pre-packaged by someone I can't relate to, it's not a real opportunity.

Edit: I've thought the above statement over, and I can't attach anything resembling logic to it. I enjoyed the data entry job; that's already enough to disprove what I'm saying. Leaving this statement here means I'd need to yell at myself a few posts from now. So I hereby retract that 74, and replace it with this one:

At the moment, I can't find a way to rationally justify never working for other people.

Myself and Iin which I demonstrate how self-absorbed I am

It seems to me that when we interact with other people, we're secretly hoping they'll be like us. I don't think that's only true with weird people like me, either. Each common interest is another opportunity for interaction. Each agreement means more opportunities to build on (or repeat) that point later. Each common personality trait means less confusion (and therefore frustration) over actions.

Of course, you could also say the reverse. Agreeing on the basics means it's easier to argue about the conclusions. Common personality traits can lead to an exceptional level of animosity if those traits are disliked.

I doubt anyone reading this is going to agree, but this is the conclusion I draw: You can't love another person like you love yourself, and you can't hate another person like you hate yourself. All human interaction is a faint echo of what you'd get (both in positive and negative interactions) if you got yourself a time machine, went back to yesterday, and met yourself.

We can't do that, obviously. Yet.

I think the person who gets closest (apart from identical twins, those lucky jerks) is the storyteller. All his characters are reflections of himself, because if they weren't he couldn't know how they'd act. I think writing these characters is closer to interacting with oneself than, say, raising kids, because even though some of the DNA is shared, the actions and reactions are usually unpredictable to both sides. But when you imagine a person, he is a perfect (if quite twisted) copy of yourself.

The fact that character and creator are operating on different planes of existence is a problem, I'll admit. The writer can bridge the gap a bit by introducing some lesson at the end, because then the character sees the hand of the creator, even if it's not recognized for what it is. But the only sustainable way to approximate self-interaction is to have multiple characters. Sometimes it'll be really clear that the characters represent specific aspects of their writer, and sometimes it'll be so subtle that the storyteller doesn't see it himself.

Myself, I don't do subtlety. The first story I remember writing (when I was 5) involved me interacting with a bunch of ghosts. Their names were Mory 1, Mory 2, Mory 3, Mory 4, and so on. And I'm still doing that today, obviously. Telling stories about "Ariel", arguing with the personification of this blog, talking with a girl who's a lot like me I am not.

Yes you are.

Oh, also, you never let me show up anymore.

Okay. The point is, these are all substitutes to getting to talk to myself. Which I haven't gotten to do yet.

So if I ever get unduly frustrated when you show a lack of interest in certain topics, or when you say perfectly reasonable things which I disagree with, or when you act a certain way, please understand that it's nothing personal. I was just kind of hoping to see someone else.

74

If you can't solve a problem, then you don't understand it well enough.

There was a time when I looked forward to math tests, as one looks forward to a boss fight in an action game. I guess that'd be ninth grade. I never prepared for them in the usual sense, memorizing rules and revisiting notes. But I was always ready, because in math classes the teacher would keep my mind sharp with riddles. And every now and then I'd read ahead in the textbook, not just to keep up my image as the smartest one in the class but also because I just wanted to see where it went.

When a test day came, everyone else would be groaning. But I was excited by the challenge. I would look at the first question, and be taken totally by surprise by it because I hadn't been paying attention to what everyone else was learning. But it was just another riddle. I'd sit there for a minute, just rereading the question over and over, trying to wrap my head around it. And I'd scribble down some general calculations at the bottom of the test sheet, to figure out what the basic principle was that I'd need to be using. And I kept analyzing and scribbling and pondering until I felt that I understood the question. And then there was no problem at all, just the fun of seeing it through.

Thinking back on it, I guess I had a really nice teacher that year. Russian guy, I think. He got me into a national competition once; I didn't really care about it, but he was pushing me to be in it so I was in it. I got in, and then I dropped out because I just wasn't as fast as anyone else there. See, the questions were much tougher. And I could have analyzed and pondered and scribbled for hours and hours, and I'm confident I could have figured it out. But there was a time limit.

I remember having trouble with time limits. Often I'd realize during a test that there were only twenty minutes left, and I still had too many questions left. Then I'd need to rush myself, and I got into a bit of a panic. Learning-by-doing works, but it's slow. You can't be slow.

There was a competition before that -not a serious one, but a competition- that I was in. Sixth grade. (I guess I must have already been doing well at math by that point.) It was a silly little thing, set up by our school for boys of my grade. It was in our local matnas, the same place where we recently opened 1776. I don't remember the format. What I do remember is being up there, on stage, feeling that I needed just another thirty seconds, and I remember crying so that they'd give me what I wanted. Man, I was a crappy kid. I think they caved and gave me a bit more time. In the end I won. Probably first place, though I can't be sure. The prize was the board game Abalone, which to this day I've played probably three times.

Those competitions didn't make much impression on me at the time.

In between the two there was seventh grade, where I spent the classes scribbling Visual Basic code onto math paper, or improving the alphabet I'd invented the year before. (I called it "Arellian", after my middle name. I don't call it that anymore.) The teacher once gave me a tenth grade test, and I passed it. It was a really simple test- it must have been for the three-point bagrut guys. That's why, at a time when I suspected I was going to get expelled, I was instead allowed to skip eighth grade.

That's why in ninth grade, I felt a lot of pressure to seem more intelligent than I actually was. If I wasn't always the best in the class at whatever I had a chance to be good at, everyone would see me as privileged. As the spoiled little boy who cried about how terrible school was until people gave in and treated him to what he didn't deserve. So in computer class I started (and never continued) working on a Breakout game, in Hebrew grammar class I was correcting everyone else's mistakes, during recesses I'd show off my piano playing, and in math class I needed to be above everyone else. It may very well be that I would have done all this anyway, but there was a lot of pressure to be that person all the time. There was especially a lot of pressure in math class, because we started sharing that with the neighboring school, whose students were more typical Israelis who -I was certain- would have mocked me for any slip-ups.

When people came to me for help with their math homework, on the one hand I was happy because it meant I was still doing okay, but on the other hand it meant that I needed to be very careful. For the first thirty seconds of frantically analyzing the question, I knew less than the person asking about how to solve such a problem. And I needed for them to not see that, or else I'd be a joke.

(That was the year when I briefly considered developing multiple personalities. I didn't realize at the time that it was a well-known practice, rather than just an idea I myself had invented. I never started, though, because I never saw an immediate need that year.)

The following year we moved to the Mevasseret yeshiva's campus, and used their math teacher. He was a loathsome fellow, who mocked his students rather than challenging them. I saw the reason for this on many occasions: he didn't really understand math, and was using this behavior to cover for it. (I'm only thinking about this now, but he must have been so nervous walking into the classroom.) I stopped trying to act smart, and very slowly the rest of the grade caught up in their memorizations with what I understood. And then tests were something I dreaded. I had lost most of my motivation for learning math, but I sometimes was incapable of understanding the questions in the time allotted. The first time that year I had a math test I couldn't pass, I walked back to the bus crying. Still spoiled, I guess.

The last math teacher I had was lousy, but not offensively so. For a time I came to classes and spent them imagining videogames, and then I just stopped coming.

Every now and then Dena asks me to help her with her homework. It hurts me a little, because I can't anymore. I really can't. Things which used to make sense to me (with some effort) no longer make any sense at all.

I still use math every now and then. In programming games, I often run into very simple geometry or algebra problems which I solve on bits of scrap paper. Very rarely there's a trigonometry problem. I can solve them, with some effort.