As I get older, the less I can study late at night.

I think I was about 17 when I made this account? It was near the tail end of my high school time. Back then, I could study all night until 5 AM without any caffeine, and I'd spend so many nights just reading stuff that I thought was cool during COVID. It was a really schizo range of topics, from manga to Aristotle to whatever else caught my eye. I'd crash, wake up at 1 or 2 AM, go work out, and repeat the cycle. 

I'm in my early 20s now, so I'm still young, but I can barely study until 2-ish. I'm a lot more efficient with my study time than when I was a teenager, but I wish I had my teenager energy back. 

There's definitely compounding factors. I think I wrecked my body about a year ago taking this one Grad programming class that had 60 hour homeworks on top of a few upperdiv math classes + research. I lost about 20 pounds and barely slept. I'm sure there was some mental stress there too - I would only regularly see two people, my roommate and a close friend of mine who was super concerned about my health because of that semester. While I've recovered the weight and get regular sleep nowadays, I don't think my body has fully recovered from the stress that semester placed on me. 

I wonder to what extent I enjoy this type of stuff though. I definitely get bored if there's nothing to study. I guess man by his nature likes to stretch himself out towards knowing, but I wonder if I have a disordered attachment towards doing hard stuff. It's when taxing myself to exhaustion that I truly feel satisfied, but it's definitely had its toll on my body. I wonder if I'd tell freshman me to not do the path that I took. 

But I'd be fooling myself if I thought freshman me would listen to my current advice, if it was against studying until fatigue set in. I don't think I would have been able to live with myself if I didn't develop my skills as fast as possible. 

I'm not sure. I can pretend to have all the answers, but at the end of the day I'm just a confused zoomer. All I know is that I'll follow my instincts wherever they'll take me, like some sort of animal. That usually works out.

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 It's a vibe grinding math homework late at my workstation at my lab, when there's no one to bug me. Until I eventually stumble home at 2:30 AM, drink a glass or two of milk, and pass out from exhaustion, I'm in a specific zone, and I'm not sure what it is. I'm going to miss these days, because they won't last after college, but they're so comfy. I have free rein to explore my thoughts in this environment.

And the question for tonight is on the topic of friendship. The question of, "what does it mean to have a friend close enough that you consider each other family" is a question that I think about a lot. It's an old question too; I think about what St. Gregory the Theologian felt at St. Basil's death, saying that he felt like a part of his soul died. The Achaeans of old definitely felt this, or Achilles would not have gone into a legendary rage that we still sing about when Patroclus died.

By nature, I'm somewhat reclusive about both my true feelings towards people and my true thoughts about things. Someone managing to truly break this shell is an achievement that only a handful of people have really done, usually through me being in a place where I'm hurting a lot, potentially while being inebriated. But if someone's opened up their whole soul to me, and I have to them, I no longer have any reason to hold back though. I can reveal everything to them, with the fullest intensity. 

It's a rare sight, but it's a blessed state whenever this happens. In the last few books of his Ethics, Aristotle talks about the various types of friendships. There are your friendships of pleasure, your friendships of convenience, and the only "real" sort of friendship, the friendship of virtue, all of which are to varying degrees. Since for Aristotle, virtue imitates something divine (since ultimately virtue is beautiful and beauty is God's activity in a thing), these friendships aid in contemplation of the Divine, which is the most excellent thing as the Philosopher states in his Metaphysics.  

I think Aristotle is right. I think that there's a fourth type of friendship though - a friendship not only predicated on virtue on a natural level, but on a supernatural level. One with very real spiritual significance. I'll post a quote from St. Francis de Sales here that I pray with a lot:

"It is a blessed thing to love on earth as we hope to love in heaven, and to begin that friendship here which is to endure for ever there. I am not now speaking of simple charity, a love due to all mankind, but of that spiritual friendship which binds souls together, leading them to share devotions and spiritual interests, so as to have but one mind between them." 

 Being able to call someone not related to you "brother" or "sister" in a very real way is a specific vibe. You shoulder their burdens, and you fight for them. One of these friends has been going through a lot of stuff recently. I'm not some sort of altruist, but helping said friend work out deep personal thoughts and stuff, while it's tiring, was insanely rewarding. I'd be lying if I said that incident wasn't the catalyst for this entire post. 

But this ends my incoherent screed. I should probably go to sleep or something, I have a PDE exam tomorrow and homework due in Abstract Algebra right after that. Pray for me, im just trying to survive and its slated to be a rough week :konatacry:

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