She introduced me as her associate. It sounded so dignified and official, I couldn't help but smile. I'm hardly an associate. I would classify myself as an apprentice. I try not to think of myself as either. One implies more knowledge and experience than I can claim, and the other admits that my previous education played virtually no role in my acquisition of this job.

Last night I tried to talk to some post-graduate friends about the nature of photons and light and how they act like waves. If you were to build a wall in the ocean where the wall has a space cut out of it and you were to watch the waves breaking against the wall and going through the space, the water would rush through the space and create semi-circular waves of increasing size. Light works the same way. When you send photons through a similar construction, they make the same semi-circular pattern. But here's the crazy part -- if you were to send those photons through individually and map their pattern, they will make the same pattern that they would have if they were all sent through together. Which means that they do not actually act like a wave, but in fact they act like they act like a wave. And the same can be said for photons being sent through a piece of glass. A percentage, let's say 4% of the light that hits a piece of glass bounces back, and 96% goes through. If you were to send 100 photons through that piece of glass individually, 4 out of that 100 would bounce back. And the only way to explain this is that that's just how the universe works. That's not to say that we haven't yet found a better explanation -- that is the explanation.
They were uninterested.
I didn't go to school for this -- to graduate and stop being interested in learning. I enjoy spending time with my friends that are still in school because they're so saturated with knowledge and learning that they can't help but talk about it. That's not the case with my post-graduate friends. It's not that they're entirely opposed to the search for knowledge, it's just that they don't seek it. And maybe I don't either, and maybe the only time that we need and want to talk about learning is when exterior forces are motivating us -- like tests and papers and passing a class.
I don't want to run out of things to say because the same topics have already been rehashed to death. I don't want to watch television because there's nothing better to do or to talk about. I don't want to feel mundane.