No one told me that it would be this hard to grasp basic physics without yet understanding the basic math. They made me change my math because I wouldn’t have been able to understand the math I wanted to take without the course I’m in now, but they didn’t say anything about how difficult it would be to jump straight into phys 1 without having already mastered the math I’m currently taking at the same time.

This is going to be a very difficult few months. I’m not at all sure I’ll be able to pull this off. On Thursday I sat in my very first physics class, completely understanding the concept of everything I was being told, but not being able to verify or back it up with the appropriate math. I felt so stupid at the end of that lesson that I had to sit down with A Brief History of Time when I got home, which makes me feel smart because it doesn’t have any math in it, and, as I said, I get the concepts, I get the idea of it all.

I thought that maybe when I sat down with my homework on my own and tried to think it through, I would understand what I was doing, but it didn’t really work out that way. I’ve just spent about an hour labouring my way through two tasks from my book, trying to calculate speed and acceleration, and trying to read the same things off a graph. Is there some kind of trick for calculating seconds into minutes and seconds? Cause if I try to turn 400 seconds into minutes, I get 6.666666667, 6 being 6 minutes, but how many seconds is .666666667 minutes?

I want to understand this. I want to feel smart, but right now I just feel like a stupid kid who doesn’t understand anything at all.

The flat’s a mess. We haven’t cleaned the kitchen in a week, and the living room is full of empty take-out boxes, cause we’re hardly ever home at the same time to clean up together the way we usually do, or have dinner together.

I feel like everything’s crashing. I’m falling to bits. I want to understand all this stuff, but I can’t, and I just sit and stare at the page, willing it to make sense, and it just doesn’t. None of it does.